Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl Jung

Memories,
W^^ Ureams,

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Aniela Jaf fe 9

TranslatedfrDm the '^m
German by 1
Richard and
Clara Winston

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■PC. G. Jung

Memories, Dreams,
Reflections

by C. G. Jung

Recorded And Edited By Aniela Jaffe

Translated From The German By
Richard and Clara Winston
REVISED EDITION
VINTAGE BOOKS

Introduction

He looked at his own Soul
with a Telescope. What seemed
all irregular, he saw and
shewed to be beautiful
Constellations; and he added
to the Consciousness hidden
worlds within worlds.
Coleridge, Notebooks

This Book had its inception during the Eranos Conference held in
Ascona in the summer of 1956. There the publisher Kurt Wolff, in
conversation with friends from Zurich, spoke of his wish to have
Pantheon Books of New York publish a biography of Carl Gustav
lung. Dr. Jolande Jacobi, one of C. G.Jung's associates, proposed
that the office of biographer be entrusted to me.

All of us were well aware that the task would by no means be an
easy one. Jung's distaste for exposing his personal life to the public
eye was well known, Indeed, he gave his consent only after a long
period of doubt and hesitation. But once he had done so, he
allotted to me an entire afternoon once a week for our work
together. Considering the press of his regular program of work, and
how easily he tired-for even then he was past eighty— that was a
great deal of time.

We began in the spring of 1957. It had been proposed that the
book be written not as a "biography," but in the form of an
"autobiography," with Jung himself as the narrator. This plan
determined the form of the book, and my first task consisted solely
in asking questions and noting down Jung's replies. Although he
was rather reticent at the beginning, he soon warmed to the work.
He began telling about himself, his development, his dreams, and

his thoughts with growing interest.

By the end of the year Jung's affirmative attitude toward our joint
efforts led to a decisive step. After a period of inner turbulence,
long-submerged images out of his childhood rose to the surface of
his mind. He sensed their connection with ideas in the works he
had written in his old age, but could not grasp it clearly. One
morning he informed me that he wanted to set down his
recollections of his childhood directly. By this time he had already
told me a good many of his earliest memories, but there were still
great gaps in the story.

This decision was as gratifying as it was unexpected, for I knew
how great a strain writing was for Jung. At his advanced age he
would not undertake anything of the sort unless he felt it was a
"task" imposed on him from within. Here was evidence that the
"autobiography" was justified in terms of Jung's own inner life.

Some time after this new development, I noted down a remark of
his: "A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something
unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe
for myself any predetermined course. Thus this 'autobiography 1 is
now taking a direction quite different from what I had imagined at
the beginning. It has become a necessity for me to write down my
early memories. If I neglect to do so for a single day, unpleasant
physical symptoms immediately follow. As soon as I set to work
they vanish and my head feels perfectly clear."

In April 1958 Jung finished the three chapters on his childhood,
school days, and years at the university. At first he called them, "On
the Early Events of My Life." These chapters ended with the
completion of his medical studies in 1900.

This, however, was not the sole direct contribution that Jung made

to the book. In January 1959 he was at his country house in
Bollingen, He devoted every morning to reading chosen chapters of
our book, which had meanwhile been hammered into shape. When
he returned the chapter, "On Life after Death," he said to me,
"Something within me has been touched. A gradient has formed,
and I must write." Such was the origin of "Late Thoughts," in which
he voiced his deepest and perhaps his most far-reaching
convictions.

In the summer of that same year of 1959, likewise in Bollingen,
Jung wrote the chapter on Kenya and Uganda. The section on the
Pueblo Indians is taken from an unpublished and unfinished
manuscript that deals with general questions of the psychology of
primitives.

In order to complete the chapters "Sigmund Freud" and
"Confrontation with the Unconscious," I incorporated a number of
passages from a seminar delivered in 1925, in which Jung spoke
for the first time of his inner development. The chapter "Psychiatric
Activities" is based on conversations between Jung and the young
assistant doctors of the Zurich mental hospital of Burgholzli in 1956.
At that time one of his grandsons was working as a psychiatrist
there. The conversations took place in Jung's house in Kusnacht.

Jung read through the manuscript of this book and approved it.
Occasionally he corrected passages or added new material. In turn,
I have used the records of our conversations to supplement the
chapters he wrote himself, have expanded his sometimes terse
allusions, and have eliminated repetitions. The further the book
progressed, the closer became the fusion between his work and
mine.

The genesis of the book to some extent determined its contents.
Conversation or spontaneous narration is inevitably casual, and that

tone has carried over to the entire "autobiography." The chapters
are rapidly moving beams of light that only fleetingly illuminate the
outward events of Jung's life and work. In recompense, they
transmit the atmosphere of his intellectual world and the experience
of a man to whom the psyche was a profound reality. I often asked
Jung for specific data on outward happenings, but I asked in vain.
Only the spiritual essence of his life's experience remained in his
memory, and this alone seemed to him worth the effort of telling.
Far more signifcant than the difficulties of formal organization of the
text were those prior obstacles, of a more personal kind, to which
Jung refers in a letter to a friend of his student days. Replying to a
request, in the latter part of 1957, to set down the memories of his
youth, he wrote:

"... You are quite right. When we are old, we are drawn back, both
from within and from without, to memories of youth. Once before,
some thirty years ago, my pupils asked me for an account of how I
arrived at my conceptions of the unconscious. I fulfilled this request
by giving a seminar.[1] During the last years the suggestion has
come to me from various quarters that I should do something akin
to an autobiography. I have been unable to conceive of my doing
anything of the sort. I know too many autobiographies, with their
self-deceptions and downright lies, and I know too much about the
impossibility of self-portrayal, to want to venture on any such
attempt.

"Recently I was asked for autobiographical information, and in the
course of answering some questions I discovered hidden in my
memories certain objective problems which seem to call for closer
examination. I have therefore weighed the matter and come to the
conclusion that I shall fend off other obligations long enough to take
up the very first beginnings of my life and consider them in an
objective fashion. This task has proved so difficult and singular that
in order to go ahead with it, I have had to promise myself that the

results would not be published in my lifetime. Such a promise
seemed to me essential in order to assure for myself the necessary
detachment and calm. It became clear that all the memories which
have remained vivid to me had to do with emotional experiences
that arouse uneasiness and passion in the mind-scarcely the best
condition for an objective account! Your letter 'naturally 1 came at the
very moment when I had virtually resolved to take the plunge.

1 The 1925 seminar mentioned earlier.

"Fate will have it-and this has always been the case with me — that
all the 'outer' aspects of my life should be accidental. Only what is
interior has proved to have substance and a determining value. As
a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these
'Outer' experiences were never so very essential anyhow, or were
so only in that they coincided with phases of my inner development.
An enormous part of these "outer' manifestations of my life has
vanished from my memory -for the very reason, so it has seemed
to me, that I participated in them with all my energies. Yet these are
the very things that make up a sensible biography: persons one has
met, travels, adventures, entanglements, blows of destiny, and so
on. But with few exceptions all these things have become for me
phantasms which I barely recollect and which my mind has no
desire to reconstruct, for they no longer stir my imagination.

"On the other hand, my recollection of 'inner' experiences has grown
all the more vivid and colorful. This poses a problem of description
which I scarcely feel able to cope with, at least for the present.
Unfortunately, I cannot, for these reasons, fulfill your request, greatly
as I regret my inability to do so.... "

This letter characterizes Jung's attitude. Although he had already
"resolved to take the plunge," the letter ends with a refusal. To the
day of his death the conflict between affirmation and rejection was

never entirely settled. There always remained a residue of
skepticism, a shying away from his future readers. He did not
regard these memoirs as a scientific work, nor even as a book by
himself. Rather, he always spoke and wrote of it as "Aniela Jaffe's
project," to which he had made contributions. At his specific
request it is not to be included in his Collected Works.

Jung has been particularly reticent in speaking of his encounters
with people, both public figures and close friends and relatives. "I
have spoken with many famous men of my time, the great ones in
science and politics, with explorers, artists and writers, princes and
financial magnates; but if I am to be honest I must say that only a
few such encounters have been significant experiences for me. Our
meetings were like those of ships on the high seas, when they dip
their flags to one another. Usually, too, these persons had
something to ask of me which I am not at liberty to divulge. Thus I
have retained no memories of them, however important these
persons may be in the eyes of the world. Our meetings were without
portent; they soon faded away and bore no deeper consequences.
But of those relationships which were vital to me, and which came
to me like memories of far-off times, I cannot speak, for they pertain
not only to my innermost life but also to that of others. It is not for me
to fling open to the public eye doors that are closed forever. "

The paucity of outward events is, however, amply compensated by
the account of Jung's inner experiences, and by a rich harvest of
thoughts which, as he himself says, are an integral part of his
biography. This is true first and foremost of his religious ideas, for
this book contains Jung's religious testament.

Jung was led to a confrontation with religious questions by a
number of different routes. There were his childhood visions, which
brought him face to face with the reality of religious experience and
remained with him to the end of his life. There was his

insuppressible curiosity concerning everything that had to do with
the contents of the psyche and its manifestations-the urge to know
which characterized his scientific work. And, last but not least, there
was his conscience as a physician. Jung regarded himself primarily
as a doctor, a psychiatrist. He was well aware that the patient's
religious attitude plays a crucial part in the therapy of psychic
illnesses. This observation coincided with his discovery that the
psyche spontaneously produces images with a religious content,
that it is "by nature religious." It also became apparent to him that
numerous neuroses spring from a disregard for this fundamental
characteristic of the psyche, especially during the second half of
life.

Jung's concept of religion differed in many respects from traditional
Christianity-above all in his answer to the problem of evil and his
conception of a God who is not entirely good or kind. From the
viewpoint of dogmatic Christianity, Jung was distinctly an
"outsider." For all his world-wide fame, this verdict was forcibly
borne in upon him by the reactions to his writings. This grieved him,
and here and there in this book he expresses the disappointment of
an investigator who felt that his religious ideas were not properly
understood. More than once he said grimly, "They would have
burned me as a heretic in the Middle Agesl" Only since his death
have theologians in increasing numbers begun to say that Jung was
indubitably an outstanding figure in the religious history of our
century.

Jung explicitly declared his allegiance to Christianity, and the most
important of his works deal with the religious problems of the
Christian. He looked at these questions from the standpoint of
psychology, deliberately setting a bound between it and the
theological approach. In so doing he stressed the necessity of
understanding and reflecting, as against the Christian demand for
faith. He took this necessity for granted, as one of the essential

features of life. "I find that all my thoughts circle around God like the
planets around the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by Him. I
would feel it to be the grossest sin if I were to oppose any
resistance to this force," he wrote in 1952, to a young clergyman.

This book is the only place in his extensive writings in which Jung
speaks of God and his personal experience of God. While he was
writing of his youthful rebellion against the church, he once said, "At
that time I realized that God-for me, at least-was one of the most
immediate experiences? In his scientific works Jung seldom
speaks of God; there he is at pains to use the term "the God-image
in the human psyche." This is no contradiction. In the one case his
language is subjective, based upon inner experience; in the other it
is the objective language of scientific inquiry. In the first case he is
speaking as an individual, whose thoughts are influenced by
passionate, powerful feelings, intuitions, and experiences of a long
and unusually rich life; in the second, he is speaking as the scientist
who consciously restricts himself to what may be demonstrated and
supported by evidence. As a scientist, Jung is an empiricist.

When Jung speaks of his religious experiences in this book, he is
assuming that his readers are willing to enter into his point of view.
His subjective statements will be acceptable only to those who have
had similar experiences-or, to put it another way, to those in whose
psyche the God-image bears the same or similar features.

The chapter entitled "The Work," with its brief survey of the genesis
of Jung's most important writings, is fragmentary. How could this be
otherwise, when his collected works comprise nearly twenty
volumes? Moreover, Jung never felt any disposition to offer a
summary of his ideas-either in conversation or in writing. When he
was asked to do so, he replied in his characteristic, rather drastic
fashion, "That sort of thing lies totally outside my range. I see no
sense in publishing a condensation of papers in which I went to so

much trouble to discuss the subject in detail. I should have to omit
all my evidence and rely on a type of categorical statement which
would not make my results any easier to understand. The
characteristic ruminant activity of ungulate animals, which consists
in the regurgitation of what has already been chewed over, is
anything but stimulating to my appetite.... "

The reader should therefore regard this chapter as a retrospective
sketch written in response to a special occasion, and not expect it
to be comprehensive.

The short glossary which I have included at the end of the book, at
the publisher's request, will, I hope, be of help to the reader who is
not familiar with Jung's work and terminology. I have taken a small
number of the definitions from the Worterbuck der Psychologie und
ihrer Grenzgebiete, with the kind permission of its editor, Kurt von
Sury, M.D. Wherever possible I have elucidated the concepts of
Jungian psychology by quotations from Jung's works, and have
supplemented the dictionary's definitions in the same way. These
quotations must, however, be regarded as no more than suggestive
hints. Jung was constantly defining his concepts in new and
different ways, for an ultimate definition, he felt, was not possible.
He thought it wise to let the inexplicable elements that always cling
to psychic realities remain as riddles or mysteries.

A great many persons have helped me with this inspiring and
difficult task, have shown unfailing interest during the slow growth of
the book, and have furthered its progress by stimulating
suggestions and criticism. To all of them I offer heartfelt thanks.
Here I shall mention by name only Helen and Kurt Wolff, of Locarno,
who conceived the idea of the book and helped to bring that idea to
fruition; Marianne and Walther Niehus-Jung, of Kusnacht-Zurich,
who throughout the years in which it was taking shape aided me by
word and deed; and B. F. C. Hull, of Palma de Mallorca, who gave

me advice and help with unflagging patience.
Aniela Jarre
December 1961

Contents

Prologue

I First Yeans

II School Yeans

III Student Yeans

IV Psychiatric Activities

V Sigmund Freud

VI Confrontation with the Unconscious

VII The Work

VIII The Tower

IX Travels

. North Africa

i. America.- The Pueblo Indians
ii. Kenya and Uganda
v. India

v. Ravenna and Rome
XVisions

Xi On Life after Death
XI Late Thoughts

Retrospect

Appendix

. Letters from Freud to Jung
i. Letters to Emma Jung from America
ii. Letter to Emma Jung from North Africa
v. Richard Wilhelm
v. Septem Sermones ad Mortuos

Glossary

The Collected Works of C G. Jung

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Prologue

MY LIFE is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.
Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the
personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions
and to experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of
science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot
experience myself as a scientific problem.

What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub
specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is
more individual and expresses life more precisely than does
science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far
too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life.

Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year, to tell
my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only "tell
stories." Whether or not the stories are "true" is not the problem.
The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.

An autobiography is so difficult to write because we possess no
standards, no objective foundation, from which to judge ourselves.
There are really no proper bases for comparison. I know that in
many things I am not like others, but I do not know what I really am
like. Man cannot compare himself with any other creature; he is not
a monkey, not a cow, not a tree. I am a man. But what is it to be
that? Like every other being, lam a splinter of the infinite deity, but I
cannot contrast myself with any animal, any plant or any stone. Only
a mythical being has a range greater than man's. How then can a
man form any definite opinions about himself?

We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly

direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about
ourselves or our lives. If we had, we would know everything-but at
most that is only a pretense. At bottom we never know how it has all
come about. The story of a life begins somewhere, at some
particular point we happen to remember; and even then it was
already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turn
out. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only be
vaguely hinted at.

The life of man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous
phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting,
so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and
develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, as a young
medical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not
have been prematurely annihilated.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome.
Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears
above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away-an
ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and
decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of
absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives
and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the
blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the
imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I
speak chiefly of inner experiences, amongst which I include my
dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific
work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to
be worked was crystallized.

All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have
paled beside these interior happenings. Many people have

participated in the story of our times and written about it; if the
reader wants an account of that, let him turn to them or get
somebody to tell it to him. Recollection of the outward events of my
life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the
"other" reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly
engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been
wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by
comparison.

Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my memories
only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the
beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind
of recollection.

Inner experiences also set their seal on the outward events that
came my way and assumed importance for me in youth or later on. I
early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within
to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very
little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience.
Therefore my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I
cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and
insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner
happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and
with these my autobiography deals.

First Years

WHEN 1 was six months old, my parents moved from Kesswil on
Lake Constance to Laufen, the castle and vicarage above the Falls
of the Rhine. This was in 1875. My memories begin with my second
or third year. I recall the vicarage, the garden, the laundry house, the
church, the castle, the Falls, the small castle of Worth, and the
sexton's farm. These are nothing but islands of memory afloat in a
sea of vagueness, each by itself, apparently with no connection
between them. One memory comes up which is perhaps the
earliest of my life, and is indeed only a rather hazy impression. I am
lying in a pram, in the shadow of a tree. It is a fine, warm summer
day, the sky blue, and golden sunlight darting through green leaves.
The hood of the pram has been left up. I have just awakened to the
glorious beauty of the day, and have a sense of indescribable well-
being. I see the sun glittering through the leaves and blossoms of
the bushes. Everything is wholly wonderful, colorful, and splendid.

Another memory: I am sitting in our dining room, on the west side of
the house, perched in a high chair and spooning up warm milk with
bits of broken bread in it. The milk has a pleasant taste and a
characteristic smell. This was the first time I became aware of the
smell of milk. It was the moment when, so to speak, I became
conscious of smelling. This memory, too, goes very far back.

Still another: a lovely summer evening. An aunt said to me, "Now I
am going to show you something." She took me out in front of the
house, on the road to Dachsen. On the far horizon the chain of the

Alps lay bathed in glowing sunset reds. The Alps could be seen
very clearly that evening. "Now look over there"-l can hear her
saying to me in Swiss dialect — "the mountains are all red." For the
first time I consciously saw the Alps. Then I was told that the next
day the village children would be going on a school outing to the
Uetliberg, near Zurich. I wanted so much to go too. To my sorrow, I
was informed that children as small as I could not go along, there
was nothing to be done about it. From then on the Uetliberg and
Zurich became an unattainable land of dreams, near to the glowing,
snow- covered mountains.

From a somewhat later period comes another memory. My mother
took me to the Thurgau to visit friends, who had a castle on Lake
Constance. I could not be dragged away from the water. The waves
from the steamer washed up to the shore, the sun glistened on the
water, and the sand under the water had been curled into little
ridges by the waves. The lake stretched away and away into the
distance. This expanse of water was an inconceivable pleasure to
me, an incomparable splendor. At that time the idea became fixed
in my mind that I must live near a lake; without water, I thought,
nobody could live at all.

Still another memory comes up: strangers, bustle, excitement. The
maid comes running and exclaims, "The fishermen have found a
corpse-came down the Falls-they want to put it in the washhousel"
My father says, "Yes, yes." I want to see the dead body at once. My
mother holds me back and sternly forbids me to go into the garden.
When all the men had left, I quickly stole into the garden to the
washhouse. But the door was locked. I went around the house; at
the back there was an open drain running down the slope, and I saw
blood and water trickling out. I found this extraordinarily interesting.
At that time I was not yet four years old.

Yet another image: I am restive, feverish, unable to sleep. My father

carries me in his arms, paces up and down, singing his old student
songs. I particularly remember one I was especially fond of and
which always used to soothe me, "Alles schweige, jeder neige ..."
The beginning went something like that. To this day I can remember
my father's voice, singing over me in the stillness of the night.

I was suffering, so my mother told me afterward, from general
eczema. Dim intimations of trouble in my parents' marriage
hovered around me. My illness, in 1878, must have been connected
with a temporary separation of my parents. My mother spent
several months in a hospital in Basel, and presumably her illness
had something to do with the difficulty in the marriage. An aunt of
mine, who was a spinster and some twenty years older than my
mother, took care of me. I was deeply troubled by my mother's
being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word
"love" was spoken. The feeling I associated with "woman" was for a
long time that of innate unreliability. "Father," on the other hand,
meant reliability and powerlessness. That is the handicap I started
off with. Later, these early impressions were revised: I have trusted
men friends and been disappointed by them, and I have mistrusted
women and was not disappointed.

While my mother was away, our maid, too, looked after me. I still
remember her picking me up and laying my head against her
shoulder. She had black hair and an olive complexion, and was
quite different from my mother. I can see, even now, her hairline, her
throat, with its darkly pigmented skin, and her ear. All this seemed
to me very strange and yet strangely familiar. It was as though she
belonged not to my family but only to me, as though she were
connected in some way with other mysterious things I could not
understand. This type of girl later became a component of my
animal. The feeling of strangeness which she conveyed, and yet of
having known her always, was a characteristic of that figure which
later came to symbolize for me the whole essence of womanhood.

1 For this and other technical terms which are commonly used by Jung but
may be unfamiliar to the reader or no longer fresh in his mind, see the
glossary at the end of the book.

From the period of my parents' separation I have another memory
image: a young, very pretty and charming girl with blue eyes and fair
hair is leading me, on a blue autumn day, under golden maple and
chestnut trees along the Rhine below the Falls, near Worth castle.
The sun is shining through the foliage, and yellow leaves lie on the
ground. This girl later became my mother-in-law. She admired my
father. I did not see her again until I was twenty-one years old.

These are my outward memories. What follow now are more
powerful, indeed overwhelming images, some of which I recall only
dimly. There was a fall downstairs, for example, and another fall
against the angle of a stove leg. I remember pain and blood, a
doctor sewing a wound in my head-the scar remained visible until
my senior year at the Gymnasium. My mother told me, too, of the
time when I was crossing the bridge over the Rhine Falls to
Neuhausen. The maid caught me just in time-l already had one leg
under the railing and was about to slip through. These things point
to an unconscious suicidal urge or, it may be, to a fatal resistance
to life in this world.

At that time I also had vague fears at night. I would hear things
walking about in the house. The muted roar of the Rhine Falls was
always audible, and all around lay a danger zone. People drowned,
bodies were swept over the rocks. In the cemetery nearby, the
sexton would dig a hole-heaps of brown, upturned earth. Black,
solemn men in long frock coats with unusually tall hats and shiny
black boots would bring a black box. My father would be there in his
clerical gown, speaking in a resounding voice. Women wept. I was
told that someone was being buried in this hole in the ground.

Certain persons who had been around previously would suddenly
no longer be there. Then I would hear that they had been buried,
and that Lord Jesus had taken them to himself.

My mother had taught me a prayer which I had to say every evening.

1 gladly did so because it gave me a sense of comfort in face of the
vague uncertainties of the night:

Spread out thy wings, Lord Jesus mild,
And take to thee thy chick, thy child.
"If Satan would devour it,
No harm shall overpower it,"
So let the angels sing! "[2]

2 Breit' aus die Fluglein beide,
O Jesu meine Freude

Und nimm dein Kuchlein ein.
Will Satan es verschlingen,
Dann lass die Engel singen:
Dies Kind soil unverletzet sein.

Lord Jesus was comforting, a nice, benevolent gentleman like Herr
Wegenstein up at the castle, rich, powerful, respected, and mindful
of little children at night. Why he should be winged like a bird was a
conundrum that did not worry me any further. Far more significant
and thought-provoking was the fact that little children were
compared to chicks which Lord Jesus evidently "took" reluctantly,
like bitter medicine. This was difficult to understand. But I
understood at once that Satan liked chicks and had to be prevented
from eating them. So, although Lord Jesus did not like the taste, he
ate them anyway, so that Satan would not get them.. As far as that
went, my argument was comforting. But now I was hearing that Lord
Jesus "took" other people to himself as well, and that this "taking"
was the same as putting them in a hole in the ground.

This sinister analogy had unfortunate consequences. I began to

distrust Lord Jesus. He lost the aspect of a big, comforting,
benevolent bird and became associated with the gloomy black men
in frock coats, top hats, and shiny black boots who busied
themselves with the black box.

These ruminations of mine led to my first conscious trauma. One
hot summer day I was sitting alone, as usual, on the road in front of
the house, playing in the sand. The road led past the house up a hill,
then disappeared in the wood on the hilltop. So from the house you
could see a stretch of the road. Looking up, I saw a figure in a
strangely broad hat and a long black garment coming down from
the wood. It looked like a man wearing women's clothes. Slowly the
figure drew nearer, and I could now see that it really was a man
wearing a kind of black robe that reached to his feet. At the sight of
him I was overcome with fear, which rapidly grew into deadly terror
as the frightful recognition shot through my mind: "That is a Jesuit."
Shortly before, I had overheard a conversation between my father
and a visiting colleague concerning the nefarious activities of the
Jesuits. From the half-irritated, half-fearful tone of my father's
remarks I gathered that "Jesuits" meant something specially
dangerous, even for my father- Actually I had no idea what Jesuits
were, but I was familiar with the word "Jesus" from my little prayer.

The man coming down the road must be in disguise, I thought; that
was why he wore women's clothes. Probably he had evil intentions.
Terrified, I ran helter-skelter into the house, rushed up the stairs,
and hid under a beam in the darkest corner of the attic. I don't know
how long I remained there, but it must have been a fairly long time,
because, when I ventured down again to the first floor and
cautiously stuck my head out of the window, far and wide there was
not a trace of the black figure to be seen. For days afterward the
hellish fright clung to my limbs and kept me in the house. And even
when I began to play in the road again, the wooded hilltop was still
the object of my uneasy vigilance. Later I realized, of course, that

the black figure was a harmless Catholic priest.

At about the same time-l could not say with absolute certainty
whether it preceded this experience or not-l had the earliest dream
I can remember, a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life. I
was then between three and four years old. The vicarage stood
quite alone near Laufen castle, and there was a big meadow
stretching back from the sexton's farm. In the dream I was in this
meadow. Suddenly I discovered a dark, rectangular, stone-lined
hole in the ground. I had never seen it before. I ran forward curiously
and peered down into it. Then I saw a stone stairway leading down.
Hesitantly and fearfully, I descended. At the bottom was a doorway
with a round arch, closed off by a green curtain. It was a big, heavy
curtain of worked stuff like brocade, and it looked very sumptuous.
Curiaous to see what might be hidden behind, 1 pushed it aside. I
saw before me in the dim light a rectangular chamber about thirty
feet long. The ceiling was arched and of hewn stone. The floor was
laid with flagstones, and in the center a red carpet ran from the
entrance to a low platform. On this platform stood a wonderfully rich
golden throne. I am not certain, but perhaps a red cushion lay on the
seat. It was a magnificent throne, a real king's throne in a fairy tale.
Something was standing on it which I thought at first was a tree
trunk twelve to fifteen feet high and about one and a half to two feet
thick. It was a huge thing, reaching almost to the ceiling. But it was
of a curious composition: it was made of skin and naked flesh, and
on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and
no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing
motionlessly upward.

It was fairly light in the room, although there were no windows and
no apparent source of light. Above the head, however, was an aura
of brightness. The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it
might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep

toward me. I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment I heard from
outside and above me my mother's voice. She called out, "Yes, just
look at him. That is the man-eater!" That intensified my terror still
more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death. For many nights
afterward I was afraid to go to sleep, because I feared I might have
another dream like that.

This dream haunted me for years. Only much later did I realize that
what I had seen was a phallus, and it was decades before I
understood that it was a ritual phallus. I could never make out
whether my mother meant, "This is the man-eater," or, "That is the
man-eater." In the first case she would have meant that not Lord
Jesus or the Jesuit was the devourer of little children, but the
phallus; in the second case that the "man-eater" in general was
symbolized by the phallus, so that the dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit,
and the phallus were identical.

The abstract significance of the phallus is shown by the fact that it
was enthroned by itself, "ithyphallically" (upright) The hole in the
meadow probably represented a grave. The grave itself was an
underground temple whose green curtain symbolized the meadow,
in other words the mystery of Earth with her covering of green
vegetation. The carpet was blood-red. What about the vault?
Perhaps I had already been to the Munot, the citadel of
Schaffhausen? This is not likely, since no one would take a three-
year-old child up there. So it cannot be a memory-trace. Equally, I
do not know where the anatomically correct phallus can have come
from. The interpretation of the orificium urethrae as an eye, with the
source of light apparently above it, points to the etymology of the
word phallus (shining, bright).[3]

At all events, the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean
God "not to be named," and such it remained throughout my youth,
reappearing whenever anyone spoke too emphatically about Lord

Jesus. Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite
acceptable, never quite lovable, for again and again I would think of
his underground counterpart, a frightful revelation which had been
accorded me without my seeking it. The Jesuit's "disguise" cast its
shadow over the Christian doctrine I had been taught. Often it
seemed to me a solemn masquerade, a kind of funeral at which the
mourners put on serious or mournful faces but the next moment
were secretly laughing and not really sad at all. Lord Jesus seemed
to me in some ways a god of death, helpful, it is true, in that he
scared away the terrors of the night, but himself uncanny, a crucified
and bloody corpse. Secretly, his love and kindness, which I always
heard praised, appeared doubtful to me, chiefly because the
people who talked most about "dear Lord Jesus" wore black frock
coats and shiny black boots which reminded me of burials. They
were my father's colleagues as well as eight of my uncles-all
parsons. For many years they inspired fear in me-not to speak of
occasional Catholic priests who reminded me of the terrifying
Jesuit who had irritated and even alarmed my father. In later years
and until my confirmation, I made every effort to force myself to take
the required positive attitude to Christ. But I could never succeed in
overcoming my secret distrust.

The fear of the "black man," which is felt by every child, was not the
essential thing in that experience; it was, rather, the recognition that
stabbed through my childish brain: "That is a Jesuit." So the
important thing in the dream was its remarkable symbolic setting
and the astounding interpretation: "That is the man-eater." Not the
child's ogre of a man-eater, but the fact that this was the man-eater,
and that it was sitting on a golden throne beneath the earth. For my
childish imagination it was first of all the king who sat on a golden
throne; then, on a much more beautiful and much higher and much
more golden throne far, far away in the blue sky, sat God and Lord
Jesus, with golden crowns and white robes. Yet from this same

Lord Jesus came the "Jesuit," in black women's garb, with a broad
black hat, down from the wooded hill. I had to glance up there every
so often to see whether another danger might not be approaching.
In the dream I went down into the hole in the earth and found
something very different on a golden throne, something non-human
and underworldly, which gazed fixedly upward and fed on human
flesh. It was only fifty years later that a passage in a study of
religious ritual burned into my eyes, concerning the motif of
cannibalism that underlies the symbolism of the Mass. Only then did
it become clear to me how exceedingly unchild-like, how
sophisticated and oversophisticated was the thought that had
begun to break through into consciousness in those two
experiences. Who was it speaking in me? Whose mind had
devised them? What kind of superior intelligence was at work? I
know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "man-
eater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to
banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar
picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-
minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles
who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters,
crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware
that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them
stranded.

Who spoke to me then? Who talked of problems far beyond my
knowledge? Who brought the Above and Below together, and laid
the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life
with stormiest passion? Who but that alien guest who came both
from above and from below?

Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the
earth. What happened then was a kind of burial in the earth, and
many years were to pass before I came out again. Today I know
that it happened in order to bring the greatest possible amount of

light into the darkness. It was an initiation into the realm of
darkness. My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that
time.

I no longer remember our move to Klein-Huningen, near Basel, in
1879. But I do have a memory of something that happened several
years later. One evening my father took me out of bed and carried
me in his arms to our porch, which faced west. He showed me the
evening sky, shimmering in the most glorious green. That was after
the eruption of Krakatoa, in 1883. Another time my father took me
outside and showed me a large comet on the eastern horizon.

And once there was a great flood. The river Wiese, which flowed
through the village, had broken its dam, and in its upper reaches a
bridge had collapsed. Fourteen people were drowned and were
carried down by the yellow flood water to the Rhine. When the water
retreated, some of the corpses got stuck in the sand. When I was
told about it, there was no holding me. I actually found the body of a
middle-aged man, in a black frock coat; apparently he had just
come from church. He lay half covered by sand, his arm over his
eyes. Similarly, I was fascinated to watch a pig being slaughtered.
To the horror of my mother, I watched the whole procedure. She
thought it terrible, but the slaughtering and the dead man were
simply matters of interest to me.

My earliest memories of art go back to those years at Klein-
Huningen. The house where my parents lived was the eighteenth-
century parsonage, and in it there was a dark room. Here all the
furniture was good, and old paintings hung on the walls. I particularly
remember an Italian painting of David and Goliath. It was a mirror
copy from the workshop of Guido Reni; the original hangs in the
Louvre. How it came into our family I do not know. There was
another old painting in that room which now hangs in my son's
house: a landscape of Basel dating from the early nineteenth

century. Often I would steal into that dark, sequestered room and sit
for hours in front of the pictures, gazing at all this beauty. It was the
only beautiful thing I knew.

About that time-l must still have been a very little fellow, no more
than six years old-an aunt took me to Basel and showed me the
stuffed animals in the museum. We stayed a long time, because I
wanted to look at everything very carefully. At four O'clock the bell
rang, a sign that the museum was about to close. My aunt nagged
at me, but I could not tear myself away from the showcases. In the
meantime the room had been locked, and we had to go by another
way to the staircase, through the gallery of antiquities. Suddenly I
was standing before these marvelous figures! Utterly overwhelmed,
I opened my eyes wide, for I had never seen anything so beautiful. I
could not look at them long enough. My aunt pulled me by the hand
to the exit— I trailing always a step behind her-crying out,
"Disgusting boy, shut your eyes; disgusting boy, shut your eyes!"
Only then did I see that the figures were naked and wore fig leaves.
I hadn't noticed it at all before. Such was my first encounter with the
fine arts. My aunt was simmering with indignation, as though she
had been dragged through a pornographic institute. When I was six
years old, my parents took me on an excursion to Arlesheim. On
this occasion my mother wore a dress I have never forgotten, and it
is the only dress of hers that I can recall: it was of some black stuff
printed all over with little green crescents. My earliest recollection of
my mother is of a slender young woman wearing this dress. In all my
other memories she is older and corpulent.

We came to a church, and my mother said, "That is a Catholic
church." My curiosity, mingled with fear, prompted me to slip away
from my mother and peer through the open door into the interior. I
just had time to glimpse the big candles on a richly adorned altar (it
was around Easter) when I suddenly stumbled on a step and struck
my chin on a piece of iron. I remember that I had a gash that was

bleeding badly when my parents picked me up. My state of mind
was curious: on the one hand I was ashamed because my screams
were attracting the attention of the churchgoers, and on the other
hand I felt that I had done something forbidden. "Jesuits-green
curtain-secret of the man-eater.... So that is the Catholic Church
which has to do with Jesuits. It is their fault that I stumbled and
screamed."

For years afterward I was unable to set foot inside a Catholic
church without a secret fear of blood and falling and Jesuits. That
was the aura or atmosphere that hung about it, but at the same time
it always fascinated me. The proximity of a Catholic priest made
me even more uneasy, if that were possible. Not until I was in my
thirties was I able to confront Mater Ecclesia without this sense of
oppression. The first time was in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.

Soon after I was six my father began giving me Latin lessons, and I
also went to school. I did not mind school; it was easy for me, since
I was always ahead of the others and had learned to read before I
went there. However, I remember a time when I could not yet read,
but pestered my mother to read aloud to me out of the Orbis Pictus,
an old, richly illustrated children's book, which contained an account
of exotic religions, especially that of the Hindus. There were
illustrations of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva which I found an
inexhaustible source of interest. My mother later told me that I
always returned to these pictures.

Whenever I did so, I had an obscure feeling of their affinity with my
"original revelation"-which I never spoke of to anyone. It was a
secret I must never betray. Indirectly, my mother confirmed this
feeling, for the faint tone of contempt with which she spoke of
"heathens" did not escape me. I knew that she would reject my
"revelation" with horror, and I did not want to expose myself to any
such injury.

This unchildlike behavior was connected on the one hand with an
intense sensitivity and vulnerability, on the other hand-and this
especially-with the loneliness of my early youth. (My sister was born
nine years after me.) I played alone, and in my own way.
Unfortunately 1 cannot remember what I played; I recall only that I did
not want to be disturbed. I was deeply absorbed in my games and
could not endure being watched or judged while I played them. My
first concrete memory of games dates from my seventh or eighth
year. I was passionately fond of playing with bricks, and built towers
which I then rapturously destroyed by an "earthquake." Between my
eighth and eleventh years I drew endlessly-battle pictures, sieges,
bombardments, naval engagements. Then I filled a whole exercise
book with ink blots and amused myself giving them fantastic
interpretations. One of my reasons for liking school was that there I
found at last the playmates I had lacked for so long.

At school, I also discovered something else. But before I go into this
I should first mention that the nocturnal atmosphere had begun to
thicken. All sorts of things were happening at night, things
incomprehensible and alarming. My parents were sleeping apart. I
slept in my father's room. From the door to my mother's room came
frightening influences. At night Mother was strange and mysterious.
One night I saw coming from her door a faintly luminous, indefinite
figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along
in front of it, in the air, like a little moon. Immediately another head
was produced and again detached itself. This process was
repeated six or seven times. I had anxiety dreams of things that
were now small, now large. For instance, I saw a tiny ball at a great
distance; gradually it approached, growing steadily into a
monstrous and suffocating object. Or I saw telegraph wires with
birds sitting on them, and the wires grew thicker and thicker and my
fear greater until the terror awoke me.

Although these dreams were overtures to the physiological changes
of puberty, they had in their turn a prelude which occurred about my
seventh year. At that time I was sick with pseudo-croup,
accompanied by choking fits. One night during an attack I stood at
the foot of the bed, my head bent back over the bed rail, while my
father held me under the arms. Above me I saw a glowing blue
circle about the size of the full moon, and inside it moved golden
figures which I thought were angels. This vision was repeated, and
each time it allayed my fear of suffocation. But the suffocation
returned in the anxiety dreams. I see in this a psychogenic factor:
the atmosphere of the house was beginning to be unbreathable.

I hated going to church. The one exception was Christmas Day. The
Christmas carol "This Is the Day That God Has Made" pleased me
enormously. And then in the evening, of course, came the
Christmas tree. Christmas was the only Christian festival I could
celebrate with fervor. All others left me cold. New Year's Eve alone
had something of the attractiveness of Christmas, but definitely took
second place; Advent had a quality about it that somehow did not fit
in with the coming Christmas. It had to do with night, storms, and
wind, and also with the darkness of the house. There was
something whispering, something queer going on.

I return now to the discovery I made in the course of associating
with my rustic schoolmates. I found that they alienated me from
myself. When I was with them I became different from the way I was
at home. I joined in their pranks, or invented ones which at home
would never have occurred to me, so it seemed; although, as I knew
only too well, I could hatch up all sorts of things when I was alone. It
seemed to me that the change in myself was due to the influence of
my schoolfellows, who somehow misled me or compelled me to be
different from what I thought I was. The influence of this wider world,
this world which contained others besides my parents, seemed to
me dubious if not altogether suspect and, in some obscure way,

hostile. Though I became increasingly aware of the beauty of the
bright daylight world where "golden sunlight filters through green
leaves," at the same time I had a premonition of an inescapable
world of shadows filled with frightening, unanswerable questions
which had me at their mercy. My nightly prayer did, of course, grant
me a ritual protection since it concluded the day properly and just
as properly ushered in night and sleep. But the new peril lurked by
day. It was as if I sensed a splitting of myself, and feared it. My inner
security was threatened.

I also recall from this period (seven to nine) that I was fond of
playing with fire. In our garden there was an old wall built of large
blocks of stone, the interstices of which made interesting caves. I
used to tend a little fire in one of these caves, with other children
helping me; a fire that had to bum forever and therefore had to be
constantly maintained by our united efforts, which consisted in
gathering the necessary wood. No one but myself was allowed to
tend this fire. Others could light other fires in other caves, but these
fires were profane and did not concern me. My fire alone was living
and had an unmistakable aura of sanctity.

In front of this wall was a slope in which was embedded a stone that
jutted out-my stone. Often, when I was alone, I sat down on this
stone, and then began an imaginary game that went something like
this: "I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath." But the
stone also could say "I" and think:

"I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me." The
question then arose: '"Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or
am I the stone on which he is sitting?" This question always
perplexed me, and I would stand up, wondering who was what now.
The answer remained totally unclear, and my uncertainty was
accompanied by a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness. But
there was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret

relationship to me. I could sit on it for hours, fascinated by the puzzle
it set me.

Thirty years later I again stood on that slope. I was a married man,
had children, a house, a place in the world, and a head full of ideas
and plans, and suddenly I was again the child who had kindled a fire
full of secret significance and sat down on a stone without knowing
whether it was I or I was it. I thought suddenly of my life in Zurich,
and it seemed alien to me, like news from some remote world and
time. This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I
had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched
away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onward,
moving farther and farther away. The pull of that other world was so
strong that I had to tear myself violently from the spot in order not to
lose hold of my future.

I have never forgotten that moment, for it illuminated in a flash of
lightning the quality of eternity in my childhood. What this meant was
revealed soon afterward, in my tenth year. My disunion with myself
and uncertainty in the world at large led me to an action which at the
time was quite incomprehensible to me. I had in those days a
yellow, varnished pencil case of the kind commonly used by
primary-school pupils, with a little lock and the customary ruler. At
the end of this ruler I now carved a little manikin, about two inches
long, with frock coat, top hat, and shiny black boots. I colored him
black with ink, sawed him off the ruler, and put him in the pencil
case, where I made him a little bed. I even made a coat for him out
of a bit of wool. In the case I also placed a smooth, oblong blackish
stone from the Rhine, which I had painted with water colors to look
as though it were divided into an upper and lower half, and had long
carried around in my trouser pocket. This was his stone. All this was
a great secret. Secretly I took the case to the forbidden attic at the
top of the house (forbidden because the floorboards were worm-
eaten and rotten) and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the

beams under the roof-for no one must ever see it! I knew that not a
soul would ever find it there. No one could discover my secret and
destroy it. I felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with
myself was gone. In all diflicult situations, whenever I had done
something wrong or my feelings had been hurt, or when my father's
irritability or my mother's invalidism oppressed me, I thought of my
carefully bedded-down and wrapped-up manikin and his smooth,
prettily colored stone. From time to time-often at intervals of
weeks-l secretly stole up to the attic when I could be certain that no
one would see me. Then I clambered up on the beam, opened the
case, and looked at my manikin and his stone. Each time I did this I
placed in the case a little scroll of paper on which I had previously
written something during school hours in a secret language of my
own invention. The addition of a new scroll always had the character
of a solemn ceremonial act. Unfortunately I cannot remember what I
wanted to communicate to the manikin. I only know that my "letters"
constituted a kind of library for him. I fancy, though I cannot be
certain, that they may have consisted of sayings that particularly
pleased me.

The meaning of these actions, or how I might explain them, never
worried me. I contented myself with the feeling of newly won
security, and was satisfied to possess something that no one knew
and no one could get at. It was an inviolable secret which must
never be betrayed, for the safety of my life depended on it. Why that
was so I did not ask myself. It simply was so.

This possession of a secret had a very powerful formative influence
on my character; I consider it the essential factor of my boyhood.
Similarly, I never told anyone about the dream of the phallus; and
the Jesuit, too, belonged to that mysterious realm which I knew I
must not talk about. The little wooden figure with the stone was a
first attempt, still unconscious and childish, to give shape to the
secret. I was always absorbed by it and had the feeling I ought to

fathom it; and yet I did not know what it was I was trying to express. I
always hoped I might be able to find something-perhaps in nature-
that would give me the clue and show me where or what the secret
was. At that time my interest in plants, animals, and stones grew. I
was constantly on the lookout for something mysterious.
Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always
with the reservation: "But it is not so certain as all that!" or, "What
about that thing under the ground?" And when religious teachings
were pumped into me and I was told, "This is beautiful and this is
good," I would think to myself: "Yes, but there is something else,
something very secret that people don't know about."

The episode with the carved manikin formed the climax and the
conclusion of my childhood. It lasted about a year. Thereafter I
completely forgot the whole affair until I was thirty-five. Then this
fragment of memory rose up again from the mists of childhood with
pristine clarity. While I was engaged on the preliminary studies for
my book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. I read about the
cache of soul-stones nearArlesheim, and the Australian churingas.
I suddenly discovered that I had a quite definite image of such a
stone, though I had never seen any reproductions. It was oblong,
blackish, and painted into an upper and lower half. This image was
joined by that of the

* Translated as Psychology of the Unconscebus, 1917; reused edition,
retitled Symbols of Transformation (CW 5), 1956.

pencil box and the manikin. The manikin was a little cloaked god of
the ancient world, a Telesphoros such as stands on the monuments
of Asklepios and reads to him from a scroll. Along with this
recollection there came to me, for the first time, the conviction that
there are archaic psychic components which have entered the
individual psyche without any direct line of tradition. My father's
library-which I examined only very much later-contained not a

single book which might have transmitted any such information.
Moreover, my father demonstrably knew nothing about these things.

When I was in England in 1920, I carved out of wood two similar
figures without having the slightest recollection of that childhood
experience. One of them I had reproduced on a larger scale in
stone, and this figure now stands in my garden in Kusnacht. Only
while I was doing this work did the unconscious supply me with a
name. It called the figure Atmavictu-the "breath of life." It was a
further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream,
which was now revealed as the "breath of life," the creative impulse.
Ultimately, the manikin was a kabir, wrapped in his little cloak,
hidden in the kista, and provided with a supply of life-force, the
oblong black stone. But these are connections which became clear
to me only much later in life. When I was a child I performed the
ritual just as I have seen it done by the natives of Africa; they act first
and do not know what they are doing. Only long afterward do they
reflect on what they have done.

School Years

MY ELEVENTH Year was significant for me in another way, as I
was then sent to the Gymnasium in Basel. Thus I was taken away
from my rustic playmates, and truly entered the "great world," where
powerful personages, far more powerful than my father, lived in big,
splendid houses, drove about in expensive carriages drawn by
magnificent horses, and talked a refined German and French. Their
sons, well dressed, equipped with fine manners and plenty of
pocket money, were now my classmates. With great astonishment
and a horrible secret envy I heard them tell about their vacations in
the Alps. They had been among those glowing snowy peaks near
Zurich, had even been to the sea-this last absolutely flabbergasted
me. I gazed upon them as if they were beings from another world,
from that unattainable glory of flaming, snow-covered mountains
and from the remote, unimaginable sea. Then, for the first time, I
became aware how poor we were, that my father was a poor
country parson and I a still poorer parson's son who had holes in his
shoes and had to sit for six hours in school with wet socks. I began
to see my parents with different eyes, and to understand their cares
and worries. For my father in particular I felt compassionless,
curiously enough, for my mother. She always seemed to me the
stronger of the two.

Nevertheless I always felt on her side when my father gave vent to
his moody irritability. This necessity for taking sides was not exactly
favorable to the formation of my character. In order to liberate
myself from these conflicts I fell into the role of the superior
arbitrator who willy-nilly had to judge his parents. That caused a
certain inflatedness in me; my unstable self-assurance was

increased and diminished at the same time.

When I was nine years old my mother had had a little girl. My father
was excited and pleased. "Tonight you've been given a little sister,"
he said to me, and I was utterly surprised, for I hadn't noticed
anything. I had thought nothing of my mother's lying in bed more
frequently than usual, for I considered her taking to her bed an
inexcusable weakness in any case. My father brought me to my
mother's bedside, and she held out a little creature that looked
dreadfully disappointing: a red, shrunken face like an old man's, the
eyes closed, and probably as blind as a young puppy, I thought. On
its back the thing had a few single long red hairs which were shown
to me-had it been intended for a monkey? I was shocked and did
not know what to feel. Was this how newborn babies looked? They
mumbled something about the stork which was supposed to have
brought the baby. But then what about a litter of puppies or kittens?
How many times would the stork have to fly back and forth before
the litter was complete? And what about cows? I could not imagine
how the stork could manage to carry a whole calf in its bill. Besides,
the farmers said the cow calved, not that the stork brought the calf.
This story was obviously another of those humbugs which were
always being imposed on me. I felt sure that my mother had once
again done something I was supposed not to know about.

This sudden appearance of my sister left me with a vague sense of
distrust which sharpened my curiosity and observation. Subsequent
odd reactions on the part of my mother confirmed my suspicions
that something regrettable was connected with this birth. Otherwise
this event did not bother me very much, though it probably
contributed to intensifying an experience I had when I was twelve.

My mother had the unpleasant habit of calling after me all sorts of
good advice when I was setting out for some place to which I had
been invited. On these occasions I not only wore my best clothes

and polished shoes, but felt the dignity of my purpose and of my
appearance in public, so that it was a humiliation for me to have
people on the street hear all the ignominious things my mother
called out after me, "And don't forget to give them regards from
Papa and Mama, and wipe your nose-do you have a
handkerchief? Have you washed your hands?" And so on. It struck
me as definitely unfair that the inferiority feelings which
accompanied my self-importance should thus be exposed to the
world when I had taken every care, out of amour-propre and vanity,
to present as irreproachable an appearance as possible. For these
occasions meant a very great deal to me. On the way to the house
to which I was invited I felt important and dignified, as I always did
when I wore my Sunday clothes on a weekday. The picture changed
radically, however, as soon as I came in sight of the house I was
visiting. Then a sense of the grandeur and power of those people
overcame me. I was afraid of them, and in my smallness wished I
might sink fathoms deep into the ground. That was how I felt when I
rang the bell. The tinkling sound from inside rang like the toll of
doom in my ears. I felt as timid and craven as a stray dog. It was
ever so much worse when my mother had prepared me properly
beforehand. Then the bell would ring in my ears: "My shoes are
filthy, and so are my hands; I have no handkerchief and my neck is
black with dirt." Out of defiance I would then not convey my parents'
regards, or I would act with unnecessary shyness and
stubbornness. If things became too bad I would think of my secret
treasure in the attic, and that helped me regain my poise. For in my
forlorn state I remembered that I was also the "Other," the person
who possessed that inviolable secret, the black stone and the little
man in frock coat and top hat.

I cannot recall in my boyhood ever having thought of the possibility
of a connection between Lord Jesus-or the Jesuit in the black
robe-the men in frock coats and top hats standing by the grave, the

gravelike hole in the meadow, the underground temple of the
phallus, and my little man in the pencil case. The dream of the
ithyphallic god was my first great secret; the manikin was the
second. It does seem to me, however, that I had a vague sense of
relationship between the "soulstone" and the stone which was also
myself.

To this day, writing down my memories at the age of eighty-three, I
have never fully unwound the tangle of my earliest memories. They
are like individual shoots of a single underground rhizome, like
stations on a road of unconscious development. While it became
increasingly impossible for me to adopt a positive attitude to Lord
Jesus, I remember that from the time I was eleven the idea of God
began to interest me. I took to praying to God, and this somehow
satisfied me because it was a prayer without contradictions. God
was not complicated by my distrust. Moreover, he was not a person
in a black robe, and not Lord Jesus of the pictures, draped with
brightly colored clothes, with whom people behaved so familiarly.
Rather he was a unique being of whom, so I heard, it was
impossible to form any correct conception. He was, to be sure,
something like a very powerful old man. But to my great satisfaction
there was a commandment to the effect that "Thou shalt not make
unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything." Therefore
one could not deal with him as familiarly as with Lord Jesus, who
was no "secret." A certain analogy with my secret in the attic began
to dawn on me.

School came to bore me. It took up far too much time which I would
rather have spent drawing battles and playing with fire. Divinity
classes were unspeakably dull, and I felt a downright fear of the
mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a
perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even
know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals,
not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere

quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these
quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds,
so that it became possible to hear them, so to speak. Oddly
enough, my classmates could handle these things and found them
self-evident. No one could tell me what numbers were, and I was
unable even to formulate the question. To my horror I found that no
one understood my difficulty. The teacher, I must admit, went to
great lengths to explain to me the purpose of this curious operation
of translating understandable quantities into sounds. I finally
grasped that what was aimed at was a kind of system of
abbreviation, with the help of which many quantities could be put in
a short formula. But this did not interest me in the least. I thought the
whole business was entirely arbitrary. Why should numbers be
expressed by sounds? One might just as well express a by apple
tree, b by box, and x by a question mark, a, b, c, x, y, z: were not
concrete and did not explain to me anything about the essence of
numbers, any more than an apple tree did. But the thing that
exasperated me most of all was the proposition: If a = b and b = c,
then a = c, even though by definition a meant something other than
b, and, being different, could therefore not be equated with b, let
alone with c.

Whenever it was a question of an equivalence, then it was said that
a : a, b : b, and so on. This I could accept, whereas a : b seemed to
me a downright lie or a fraud. I was equally outraged when the
teacher stated in the teeth of his own definition of parallel lines that
they met at infinity. This seemed to me no better than a stupid trick
to catch peasants with, and I could not and would not have anything
to do with it. My intellectual morality fought against these whimsical
inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from
understanding mathematics. Right into old age I have had the
incorrigible feeling that if, like my schoolmates, I could have
accepted without a struggle the proposition that a : b, or that sun :

moon, dog = cat, then mathematics might have fooled me
endlessly-just how much I only began to realize at the age of eighty-
four. All my life it remained a puzzle to me why it was that I never
managed to get my bearings in mathematics when there was no
doubt whatever that I could calculate properly. Least of all did I
understand my own moral doubts concerning mathematics.

Equations I could comprehend only by inserting specific numerical
values in place of the letters and verifying the meaning of the
operation by actual calculation. As we went on in mathematics I was
able to get along, more or less, by copying out algebraic formulas
whose meaning I did not understand, and by memorizing where a
particular combination of letters had stood on the blackboard. I
could no longer make headway by substituting numbers, for from
time to time the teacher would say, "Here we put the expression so-
and-so," and then he would scribble a few letters on the blackboard.
I had no idea where he got them and why he did it— the only reason I
could see was that it enabled him to bring the procedure to what he
felt was a satisfactory conclusion. I was so intimidated by my
incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.

Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. Other
subjects I found easy; and as, thanks to my good visual memory, I
contrived for a long while to swindle my way through mathematics, I
usually had good marks. But my fear of failure and my sense of
smallness in face of the vast world around me created in me not
only a dislike but a kind of silent despair which completely ruined
school for me. In addition, I was exempted from drawing classes on
grounds of utter incapacity. This in a way was welcome to me, since
it gave me more free time; but on the other hand it was a fresh
defeat, since I had some facility in drawing, although I did not
realize that it depended essentially on the way I was feeling. I could
draw only what stirred my imagination. But I was forced to copy
prints of Greek gods with sightless eyes, and when that wouldn't go

properly the teacher obviously thought I needed something more
naturalistic and set before me the picture of a goat's head. This
assignment I failed completely, and that was the end of my drawing
classes.

To my defeats in mathematics and drawing there was now added a
third: from the very first I hated gymnastics. I could not endure
having others tell me how to move. I was going to school in order to
learn something, not to practice useless and senseless acrobatics.
Moreover, as a result of my earlier accidents, I had a certain
physical timidity which I was not able to overcome until much later
on. This timidity was in turn linked with a distrust of the world and its
potentialities. To be sure, the world seemed to me beautiful and
desirable, but it was also filled with vague and incomprehensible
perils. Therefore I always wanted to know at the start to what and to
whom I was entrusting myself. Was this perhaps connected with my
mother, who had abandoned me for several months? When, as I
shall describe later, my neurotic fainting spells began, the doctor
forbade me to engage in gymnastics, much to my satisfaction. I was
rid of that burden-and had swallowed another defeat.

The time thus gained was not spent solely on play. It permitted me
to indulge somewhat more freely the absolute craving I had
developed to read every scrap of printed matter that fell into my
hands.

My twelfth year was indeed a fateful one for me. One day in the
early summer of 1887 I was standing in the cathedral square,
waiting for a classmate who went home by the same route as
myself. It was twelve o'clock, and the morning classes were over.
Suddenly another boy gave me a shove that knocked me off my
feet. I fell, striking my head against the curbstone so hard that I
almost lost consciousness. For about half an hour afterward I was a
little dazed. At the moment I felt the blow the thought flashed through

my mind: "Now you won't have to go to school any more." I was only
half unconscious, but I remained lying there a few moments longer
than was strictly necessary, chiefly in order to avenge myself on my
assailant. Then people picked me up and took me to a house
nearby, where two elderly spinster aunts lived.

From then on I began to have fainting spells whenever I had to
return to school, and whenever my parents set me to doing my
homework. For more than six months I stayed away from school,
and for me that was a picnic. I was free, could dream for hours, be
anywhere I liked, in the woods or by the water, or draw. I resumed
my battle pictures and furious scenes of war, of old castles that
were being assaulted or burned, or drew page upon page of
caricatures. Similar caricatures sometimes appear to me before
falling asleep to this day, grinning masks that constantly move and
change, among them familiar faces of people who soon afterward
died.

Above all, I was able to plunge into the world of the mysterious. To
that realm belonged trees, a pool, the swamp, stones and animals,
and my father's library. But I was growing more and more away from
the world, and had all the while faint pangs of conscience. I frittered
away my time with loafing, collecting, reading, and playing. But I did
not feel any happier for it; I had the obscure feeling that I was fleeing
from myself.

I forgot completely how all this had come about, but I pitied my
parents' worries. They consulted various doctors, who scratched
their heads and packed me off to spend the holidays with relatives
in Winterthur. This city had a railroad station that proved a source of
endless delight to me. But when I returned home everything was as
before. One doctor thought I had epilepsy. I knew what epileptic fits
were like and I inwardly laughed at such nonsense. My parents
became more worried than ever. Then one day a friend called on

my father. They were sitting in the garden and I hid behind a shrub,
for I was possessed of an insatiable curiosity. I heard the visitor
saying to my father, "And how is your son?" "Ah, that's a sad
business," my father replied. "The doctors no longer know what is
wrong with him. They think it may be epilepsy. It would be dreadful if
he were incurable. I have lost what little I had, and what will become
of the boy if he cannot earn his own living?"

I was thunderstruck. This was the collision with reality.

"Why, then, I must get to work!" I thought suddenly.

From that moment on I became a serious child. I crept away, went
to my father's study, took out my Latin grammar, and began to cram
with intense concentration. After ten minutes of this I had the finest
of fainting fits. I almost fell off the chair, but after a few minutes I felt
better and went on working.

"Devil take it, I'm not going to faint," I told myself, and persisted in
my purpose. This time it took about fifteen minutes before the
second attack came. That, too, passed like the first. "And now you
must really get to workl" I stuck it out, and after an hour came the
third attack. Still I did not give up, and worked for another hour, until I
had the feeling that I had overcome the attacks. Suddenly I felt
better than I had in all the months before. And in fact the attacks did
not recur. From that day on I worked over my grammar and other
schoolbooks every day. A few weeks later I returned to school, and
never suffered another attack, even there. The whole bag of tricks
was over and done with! That was when I learned what a neurosis

Gradually the recollection of how it had all come about returned to
me, and I saw clearly that I myself had arranged this whole
disgraceful situation. That was why I had never been seriously angry

with the schoolmate who pushed me over. I knew that he had been
put up to it, so to speak, and that the whole affair was a diabolical
plot on my part. I knew, too, that this was never going to happen to
me again. I had a feeling of rage against myself, and at the same
time was ashamed of myself. For I knew that I had wronged myself
and made a fool of myself in my own eyes. Nobody else was to
blame; I was the cursed renegade! From then on I could no longer
endure my parents' worrying about me or speaking of me in a
pitying tone.

The neurosis became another of my secrets, but it was a shameful
secret, a defeat. Nevertheless it induced in me a studied
punctiliousness and an unusual diligence. Those days saw the
beginnings of my conscientiousness, practiced not for the sake of
appearances, so that I would amount to something, but for my own
sake. Regularly I would get up at five o'clock in order to study, and
sometimes I worked from three in the morning till seven, before
going to school.

What had led me astray during the crisis, was my passion for being
alone, my delight in solitude. Nature seemed to me full of wonders,
and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant,
every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I
immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very
essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

I had another important experience at about this time. I was taking
the long road to school from Klein-Huningen, where we lived, to
Basel, when suddenly for a single moment I had the overwhelming
impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud. I knew all at
once: now I am myself! It was as if a wall of mist were at my back,
and behind that wall there was not yet an "I". But at this moment I
came upon myself. Previously I had existed, too, but everything had
merely happened to me.

Now I happened to myself. Now I knew: I am myself now, now I exist.
Previously I had been willed to do this and that; now I willed. This
experience seemed to me tremendously important and new: there
was "authority" in me. Curiously enough, at this time and also during
the months of my fainting neurosis I had lost all memory of the
treasure in the attic. Otherwise I would probably have realized even
then the analogy between my feeling of authority and the feeling of
value which the treasure inspired in me. But that was not so; all
memory of the pencil case had vanished.

Around this time I was invited to spend the holidays with friends of
the family who had a house on Lake Lucerne. To my delight the
house was situated right on the lake, and there was a boathouse
and a rowboat. My host allowed his son and me to use the boat,
although we were sternly warned not to be reckless. Unfortunately I
also knew how to steer a Waidling (a boat of the gondola type)-that
is to say, standing. At home we had such a punt, in which we had
tried out every imaginable trick. The first thing I did, therefore, was
to take my stand on the stern set and with one oar push off into the
lake. That was too much for the anxious master of the house. He
whistled us back and gave me a first-class dressing-down. I was
thoroughly crest-fallen but had to admit that I had done exactly what
he had said not to, and that his lecture was quite justified. At the
same time I was seized with rage that this fat, ignorant boor should
dare to insult ME. This ME was not only grown up, but important, an
authority, a person with office and dignity, an old man, an object of
respect and awe. Yet the contrast with reality was so grotesque that
in the midst of my fury I suddenly stopped myself, for the question
rose to my lips: "'Who in the world are you, anyway?

You are reacting as though you were the devil only knows how
important! And yet you know he is perfectly right. You are barely
twelve years old, a schoolboy, and he is a father and a rich,

powerful man besides, who owns two houses and several splendid
horses."

Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually
two different persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could
not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself; the other was
important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with, as powerful
and influential as this manufacturer. This "other" was an old man
who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white
wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between
which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps.

This notion sprang from a curious experience I had had. When we
were living in Klein-Huningen an ancient green carriage from the
Black Forest drove past our house one day. It was truly an antique,
looking exactly as if it had come straight out of the eighteenth
century. When I saw it, I felt with great excitement: "That's it! Sure
enough, that comes from my times." It was as though I had
recognized it because it was the same type as the one I had driven
in myself. Then came a curious sentiment ecoeurant, as though
someone had stolen something from me, or as though I had been
cheated-cheated out of my beloved past. The carriage was a relic
of those times! I cannot describe what was happening in me or
what it was that affected me so strongly: a longing, a nostalgia, or a
recognition that kept saying, "Yes, that's how it was! Yes, that's how
it was!"

I had still another experience that harked back to the eighteenth
century. At the home of one of my aunts I had seen an eighteenth-
century statuette, an old terra-cotta piece consisting of two painted
figures. One of them was old Dr. Stuckelberger, a well-known
personality in the city of Basel toward the end of the eighteenth
century. The other figure was a patient of his; she was depicted with
closed eyes, sticking out her tongue. The story went that old

Stuckelberger was one day crossing the Rhine bridge when this
annoying patient suddenly came up to him out of nowhere and
babbled out a complaint. Old Stuckelberger said testily, "Yes, yes,
there must be something wrong with you. Put out your tongue and
shut your eyes." The woman did so, and Stuckelberger instantly ran
off, and she remained standing there with her tongue stuck out,
while the people laughed. This statuette of the old doctor had
buckled shoes which in a strange way I recognized as my own. I
was convinced that these were shoes I had worn. The conviction
drove me wild with excitement. "Why, those must be my shoes!" I
could still feel those shoes on my feet, and yet I could not explain
where this crazy feeling came from. I could not understand this
identity I felt with the eighteenth century. Often in those days I would
write the date 1786 instead of 1886, and each time this happened I
was overcome by an inexplicable nostalgia.

After my escapade with the boat, and my well-merited punishment, I
began pondering these isolated impressions, and they coalesced
into a coherent picture: of myself living in two ages simultaneously,
and being two different persons. I felt confused, and was full to the
brim with heavy reflections. At last I reached the disappointing
realization that now, at any rate, I was nothing but the little schoolboy
who had deserved his punishment, and who had to behave
according to his age. The other person must be sheer nonsense. I
suspected that he was somehow connected with the many tales I
had heard from my parents and relatives about my grandfather. Yet
that was not quite right either, for he had been born in 1 795 and had
therefore lived in the nineteenth century; moreover he had died long
before I was born. It could not be that I was identical with him. At the
time these considerations were, I should say, mostly in the form of
vague glimmerings and dreams. I can no longer remember whether
at that time I knew anything about my legendary kinship with
Goethe. I think not, however, for I know that I first heard this tale from

strangers. I should add that there is an annoying tradition that my
grandfather was a natural son of Goethe. [1 ]

1 In regard to the legend, twice alluded to in this book, that Jung was a
descendant of Goethe, he related: "The wife of my great-grandfather (Franz
Ignaz Jung, d. 1831), Sophie Zegler, and her sister were associated with
the Mannheim Theater and were friends of many writers. The story goes that
Sophie Zegler had an illegitimate child by Goethe, and that this child was
my grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung. This was considered yrtually an
established fact. My grandfather says not a word about it in his diaries,
however. He mentions only that he once saw Goethe in Weimar, and then
merely from behind! Sophie Zegler Jung was later friendly with Lotte
Kestner, a niece of Goethe's "Lottchen." This Lotte frequently came to see
my grandfather-as, incidentally, did Franz Liszt. In later years Lotte Kestner
settled in Basel, no doubt because of these close ties with the Jung family."

No proof of this item of family tradition has been found in the
available sources, the archives of the Goethehaus in Frankfurt am
Main and the baptismal register in the Jesuitenkirche in Mannheim.
Goethe was not in Mannheim at the period in question, and there is
no record of Sophie Ziegler's staying in Weimar or anywhere in
Goethe's vicinity.

Jung used to speak of this stubbornly persistent legend with a
certain gratified amusement, for it might serve to explain one subtle
aspect of his fascination with Goethe's Faust; it belonged to an
inner reality, as it were. On the other hand he would also call the
story "annoying." He thought it "in bad taste" and maintained that
the world was already full of "too many fools who tell such tales of
the 'unknown father'. " Above all, he felt that the legitimate line of
descent, in particular from the learned Catholic doctor and jurist
Carl Jung (d. 1645)-discussed at the end of Chapter Vlll-was
equally significant. — A. J.

One fine summer day that same year I came out of school at noon
and went to the cathedral square. The sky was gloriously blue, the

day one of radiant sunshine. The roof of the cathedral glittered, the
sun sparkling from the new, brightly glazed tiles. I was overwhelmed
by the beauty of the sight, and thought:

"The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful, and God made all
this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne
and..." Here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking
sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: "Don't go on thinking now!
Something terrible is coming, something I do not want to think,
something I dare not even approach. Why not? Because I would be
committing the most frightful of sins. What is the most terrible sin?
Murder? No, it can't be that. The most terrible sin is the sin against
the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. Anyone who commits that
sin is damned to hell for all eternity. That would be very sad for my
parents, if their only son, to whom they are so attached, should be
doomed to eternal damnation. I cannot do that to my parents. All I
need do is not go on thinking."

That was easier said than done. On my long walk home I tried to
think all sorts of other things, but I found my thoughts returning again
and again to the beautiful cathedral which I loved so much, and to
God sitting on the throne-and then my thoughts would fly off again
as if they had received a powerful electric shock. I kept repeating to
myself: "Don't think of it, just don't think of itl" I reached home in a
pretty worked-up state. My mother noticed that something was
wrong, and asked, "What is the matter with you? Has something
happened at school?" I was able to assure her, without lying, that
nothing had happened at school. I did have the thought that it might
help me if I could confess to my mother the real reason for my
turmoil. But to do so I would have to do the very thing that seemed
impossible: think my thought right to the end. The poor dear was
utterly unsuspecting and could not possibly know that I was in
terrible danger of committing the unforgivable sin and plunging
myself into hell. I rejected the idea of confessing and tried to efface

myself as much as possible. That night I slept badly; again and
again the forbidden thought, which I did not yet know, tried to break
out, and I struggled desperately to fend it off. The next two days
were sheer torture, and my mother was convinced that I was ill. But I
resisted the temptation to confess, aided by the thought that it
would cause my parents intense sorrow.

On the third night, however, the torment became so unbearable that
I no longer knew what to do. I awoke from a restless sleep just in
time to catch myself thinking again about the cathedral and God. I
had almost continued the thought! I felt my resistance weakening.
Sweating with fear, I sat up in bed to shake off sleep. "Now it is
coming, now-it's serious! I must think. It must be thought out
beforehand. Why should I think something I do not know? I don't
want to, by God, that's sure. But who wants me to? Who wants to
force me to think something I don't know and don't want to know?
Where does this terrible will come from? And why should I be the
one to be subjected to it? I was thinking praises of the Creator of
this beautiful world, I was grateful to him for this immeasurable gift,
so why should I have to think something inconceivably wicked? I
don't know what it is, I really don't, for I cannot and must not come
anywhere near this thought, for that would be to risk thinking it at
once. I haven't done this or wanted this, it has come on me like a
bad dream. Where do such things come from? This has happened
to me without my doing. Why? After all, I didn't create myself, I came
into the world the way God made me-that is, the way I was shaped
by my parents. Or can it have been that my parents wanted
something of this sort? But my good parents would never have had
any thoughts like that. Nothing so atrocious would ever have
occurred to them."

I found this idea utterly absurd. Then I thought of my grandparents,
whom I knew only from their portraits. They looked benevolent and

dignified enough to repulse any idea that they might possibly be to
blame. I mentally ran through the long procession of unknown
ancestors until finally I arrived at Adam and Eve. And with them
came the decisive thought: Adam and Eve were the first people;
they had no parents, but were created directly by God, who
intentionally made them as they were. They had no choice but to be
exactly the way God had created them. Therefore they did not know
how they could possibly be different. They were perfect creatures of
God, for He creates only perfection, and yet they committed the first
sin by doing what God did not want them to do. How was that
possible? They could not have done it if God had not placed in
them the possibility of doing it. That was clear, too, from the
serpent, whom God had created before them, obviously so that it
could induce Adam and Eve to sin. God in His omniscience had
arranged everything so that the first parents would have to sin.

Therefore it was God' s intention that they should sin. This thought
liberated me instantly from my worst torment, since I now knew that
God Himself had placed me in this situation. At first I did not know
whether He intended me to commit my sin or not. I no longer thought
of praying for illumination, since God had landed me in this fix
without my willing it and had left me without any help. I was certain
that I must search out His intention myself, and seek the way out
alone. At this point another argument began. "What does God
want? To act or not to act? I must find out what God wants with me,
and I must find out right away."

I was aware, of course, that according to conventional morality there
was no question but that sin must be avoided. That was what I had
been doing up to now, but I knew I could not go on doing it. My
broken sleep and my spiritual distress had worn me out to such a
point that fending off the thought was tying me into unbearable
knots. This could not go on. At the same time, I could not yield
before I understood what God's will was and what He intended. For

I was now certain that He was the author of this desperate problem.
Oddly enough, I did not think for a moment that the devil might be
playing a trick on me. The devil played little part in my mental world
at that time, and in any case I regarded him as powerless
compared with God. But from the moment I emerged from the mist
and became conscious of myself, the unity, the greatness, and the
superhuman majesty of God began to haunt my imagination. Hence
there was no question in my mind but that God Himself was
arranging a decisive test for me, and that everything depended on
my understanding Him correctly. I knew, beyond a doubt, that I
would ultimately be compelled to break down, to give way, but I did
not want it to happen without my understanding it, since the
salvation of my eternal soul was at stake.

"God knows that I cannot resist much longer, and He does not help
me, although I am on the point of having to commit the unforgivable
sin. In His omnipotence He could easily lift this compulsion from me,
but evidently He is not going to. Can it be that He wishes to test my
obedience by imposing on me the unusual task of doing something
against my own moral judgment and against the teachings of my
religion, and even against His own commandment, something I am
resisting with all my strength because I fear eternal damnation? Is it
possible that God wishes to see whether I am capable of obeying
His will even though my faith and my reason raise before me the
specters of death and hell? That might really be the answer! But
these are merely my own thoughts. I may be mistaken. I dare not
trust my own reasoning as far as that. I must think it all through once
more."

I thought it over again and arrived at the same conclusion.
"Obviously God also desires me to show courage," I thought. "If that
is so and I go through with it, then He will give me His grace and
illumination?

I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith
into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the
cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above
the world-and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon
the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the
cathedral asunder.

So that was it! I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of
the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an
unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness
and gratitude. The wisdom and goodness of God had been
revealed to me now that I had yielded 'to His inexorable command.
It was as though I had experienced an illumination. A great many
things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That
was what my father had not understood, I thought; he had failed to
experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and
out of the deepest faith. And that was why he had never
experienced the miracle of grace which heals all and makes all
comprehensible. He had taken the Bible's commandments as his
guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his
forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living
God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His
Church, who calls upon man to partake of His freedom, and can
force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to
fulfill without reserve the command of God. In His trial of human
courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred.
In His omnipotence He will see to it that nothing really evil comes of
such tests of courage. If one fulfills the will of God one can be sure
of going the right way.

God had also created Adam and Eve in such a way that they had to
think what they did not at all want to think. He had done that in order
to find out whether they were obedient. And He could also demand
something of me that I would have had to reject on traditional

religious grounds. It was obedience which brought me grace, and
after that experience I knew what God's grace was. One must be
utterly abandoned to God; nothing matters but fulfilling His will.
Otherwise all is folly and meaninglessness. From that moment on,
when I experienced grace, my true responsibility began. Why did
God befoul His cathedral? That, for me, was a terrible thought. But
then came the dim understanding that God could be something
terrible. I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It
overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive.

The experience also had the effect of increasing my sense of
inferiority. I am a devil or a swine, I thought; I am infinitely depraved.
But then I began searching through the New Testament and read,
with a certain satisfaction, about the Pharisee and the publican, and
that reprobates are the chosen ones. It made a lasting impression
on me that the unjust steward was praised, and that Peter, the
waverer, was appointed the rock upon which the Church was built.

The greater my inferiority feelings became, the more
incomprehensible did God's grace appear to me. After all, I had
never been sure of myself. When my mother once said to me, "You
have always been a good boy, I simply could not grasp it. I a good
boy? That was quite new to me. I often thought of myself as a
corrupt and inferior person.

With the experience of God and the cathedral I at last had
something tangible that was part of the great secret-as if I had
always talked of stones falling from heaven and now had one in my
pocket. But actually, it was a shaming experience. I had fallen into
something bad, something evil and sinister, though at the same
time it was a kind of distinction. Sometimes I had an overwhelming
urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some
curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out
whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never

succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As
a result, I had the feeling that I was either outlawed or elect,
accursed or blessed.

It would never have occurred to me to speak of my experience
openly, nor of my dream of the phallus in the underground temple,
nor of my carved manikin. As a matter of fact, I did not say anything
about the phallus dream until I was sixty-five. I may have spoken
about the other experiences to my wife, but only in later years. A
strict taboo hung over all these matters, inherited from my
childhood. I could never have talked about them with friends.

My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It induced
in me an almost unendurable loneliness. My one great achievement
during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it
with anyone. Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was
already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary, because I know
things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and
usually do not; even want to know.

In my mother's family there were six parsons, and on my father's
side not only was my father a parson but two of my uncles also.
Thus I heard many religious conversations, theological discussions,
and sermons. Whenever I listened to them I had the feeling: "Yes,
yes, that is all very well. But what about the secret? The secret is
also the secret of grace. None of you know anything about that. You
don't know that God wants to, force me to do wrong, that He forces
me to think abominations in order to experience His grace."
Everything the others said was completely beside the point. I
thought, "For Heaven's sake, there must be someone who knows
something about it; somewhere there must be the truth." I
rummaged through my father's library, reading whatever I could on
God, the Trinity, spirit, consciousness. I devoured the books, but
came away none the wiser. I always found myself thinking, "They

don't know either."

I even searched about in my father's Luther Bible. Unfortunately, the
conventional "edifying" interpretation of Job prevented me from
taking a deeper interest in this book. I would have found consolation
in it, especially in chapter 9, verses 30 ff.: "Though I wash myself
with snow water... yet shalt thou plunge me in the mire."

Later my mother told me that in those days I was often depressed. It
was not really that; rather, I was brooding on the secret. At such
times it was strangely reassuring and calming to sit on my stone.
Somehow it would free me of all my doubts. Whenever I thought that
I was the stone, the conflict ceased.

"The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is
eternally the same for thousands of years," I would think, "while I am
only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions,
like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out." I was but the
sum of my emotions, and the other in me was the timeless,
imperishable stone.

At that time, too, there arose in me profound doubts about
everything my father said. When I heard him preaching about grace,
I always thought of my own experience. What he said sounded stale
and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows it only by
hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself. I wanted to help him,
but I did not know how. Moreover, I was too shy to tell him of my
experience, or to meddle in his personal preoccupations. I felt
myself to be on the one hand too little, and on the other hand I was
afraid to wield that authority which my "second personality" inspired

Later, when I was eighteen years old, I had many discussions with
my father, always with the secret hope of being able to let him know

about the miracle of grace, and thereby help to mitigate his pangs
of conscience. I was convinced that if he fulfilled the will of God
everything would turn out for the best.

But our discussions invariably came to an unsatisfactory end. They
irritated him, and saddened him. "Oh nonsense," he was in the
habit of saying, "you always want to think. One ought not to think, but
believe." I would think, "No, one must experience and know," but I
would say, "Give me this belief," whereupon he would shrug and
turn resignedly away.

I began making friendships, mostly with shy boys of simple origins.
My marks in school improved. During the following years I even
succeeded in reaching the top of the class. However, I observed
that below me were schoolmates who envied me and tried at every
opportunity to catch up with me. That spoiled my pleasure. I hated
all competition, and if someone played a game too competitively I
turned my back on the game. Thereafter I remained second in the
class, and found this considerably more enjoyable. Schoolwork was
a nuisance enough anyway without my wanting to make it harder by
competitiveness. A very few teachers, whom I remember with
gratitude, showed particular confidence in me. The one I recall with
the greatest pleasure was the Latin teacher. He was a university
professor and a very clever fellow. As it happened, I had known
Latin since I was six, because my father had given me lessons in it.
So, instead of making me sit in class, this teacher would often send
me to the university library to fetch books for him, and I would joyfully
dip into them while prolonging the walk back as much as possible.

Most of the teachers thought me stupid and crafty. Whenever
anything went wrong in school I was the first on whom suspicion
rested. If there was a row somewhere, I was thought to be the
instigator. In reality I was involved in such a brawl only once, and it
was then that I discovered that a number of my school-mates were

hostile to me. Seven of them lay in ambush for me and suddenly
attacked me. I was big and strong by then-it was when I was
fifteen-and inclined to violent rages. I suddenly saw red, seized one
of the boys by both arms, swung him around me and with his legs
knocked several of the others to the ground. The teachers found out
about the affair, but I only dimly remember some sort of punishment
which seemed to me unjust. From then on I was let alone. No one
dared to attack me again.

To have enemies and be accused unjustly was not what I had
expected, but somehow I did not find it incomprehensible.
Everything I was reproached for irritated me, but I could not deny
these reproaches to myself. I knew so little about myself, and the
little was so contradictory that I could not with a good conscience
reject any accusations. As a matter of fact I always had a guilty
conscience and was aware of both actual and potential faults. For
that reason I was particularly sensitive to reproofs, since all of them
more or less struck home. Although I had not in reality done what I
was accused of, I felt that I might have done it. I would even draw up
a list of alibis in case I should be accused of something. I felt
positively relieved when I had actually done something wrong. Then
at least I knew what my guilty conscience was for.

Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward show of
security, or-to put it better-the defect compensated itself without
the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and at
the same time wishing to be innocent. Somewhere deep in the
background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son
of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive,
hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other
was grown up-old, in fact-skeptical, mistrustful, remote from the
world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the
weather, a living creatures, and above all close to the night, to
dreams, and to whatever "God" worked directly in him. I put "God"

in quotation marks here. For nature seemed, like myself, to have
been set aside by God as non-divine, although created by Him as
an expression of Himself. Nothing could persuade me that "in the
image of God" applied only to man. In fact it seemed to me that the
high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers, and animals far
better exemplified the essence of God than men with their
ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent
egotism-all qualities with which I was only too familiar from myself,
that is, from personality No. 1, the schoolboy of 1890. Besides his
world there existed another realm, like a temple in which anyone
who entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered by a
vision of the whole cosmos, so that he could only marvel and
admire, forgetful of himself. Here lived the "Other," who knew God
as a hidden, personal, and at the same time suprapersonal secret.
Here nothing separated man from God; indeed, it was as though
the human mind looked down upon Creation simultaneously with
God.

What I am here unfolding, sentence by sentence, is something I was
then not conscious of in any articulate way, though I sensed it with
an overpowering premonition and intensity of feeling. At such times
I knew I was worthy of myself, that I was my true self. As soon as I
was alone, I could pass over into this state. I therefore sought the
peace and solitude of this "Other," personality No. 2.

The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2,
which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a "split"
or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is
played out in every individual. In my life No. 2 has been of prime
importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that
wanted to come to me from within. He is a typical figure, but he is
perceived only by the very few. Most people's conscious
understanding is not sufficient to realize that he is also what they

Church gradually became a place of torment to me. For there men
dared to preach aloud-l am tempted to say, shamelessly-about
God, about His intentions and actions. There people were exhorted
to have those feelings and to believe that secret which I knew to be
the deepest, innermost certainty, a certainty not to be betrayed by a
single word. I could only conclude that apparently no one knew
about this secret, not even the parson, for otherwise no one would
have dared to expose the mystery of God in public and to profane
those inexpressible feelings with stale sentimentalities. Moreover, I
was certain that this was the wrong way to reach God, for I knew,
knew from experience, that this grace was accorded only to one
who fulfilled the will of God without reservation. This was preached
from the pulpit, too, but always on the assumption that revelation
had made the will of God plain. To me, on the other hand, it seemed
the most obscure and unknown thing of all. To me it seemed that
one's duty was to explore daily the will of God. I did not do that, but I
felt sure that I would do it as soon as an urgent reason for so doing
presented itself. Personality No. 1 preoccupied me too much of the
time. It often seemed to me that religious precepts were being put
in place of the will of God-which could be so unexpected and so
alarming-for the sole purpose of sparing people the necessity for
understanding God's will. I grew more and more skeptical, and my
father's sermons and those of other parsons became acutely
embarrassing to me. All the people about me seemed to take the
jargon for granted, and the dense obscurity that emanated from it;
thoughtlessly they swallowed all the contradictions, such as that
God is omniscient and therefore foresaw all human history, and that
he actually created human beings so that they would have to sin,
and nevertheless forbids them to sin and even punishes them by
eternal damnation in hell-fire.

Fora long time the devil had played no part in my thinking, curiously

enough. The devil appeared to me no worse than a powerful man's
vicious watchdog, chained up. Nobody had any responsibility for
the world except God, and, as I knew only too well, He could be
terrible. My doubts and uneasiness increased whenever I heard my
father in his emotional sermons speak of the "good" God, praising
God's love for man and exhorting man to love God in return. "Does
he really know what he is talking about?" I wondered. "Could he
have me, his son, put to the knife as a human sacrifice, like Isaac,
or deliver him to an unjust court which would have him crucified like
Jesus? No, he could not do that. Therefore in some cases he could
not do the will of God, which can be absolutely terrible, as the Bible
itself shows." It became clear to me that when people are exhorted,
among other things, to obey God rather than man, this is said just
casually and thoughtlessly. Obviously we do not know the will of God
at all, for if we did we would treat this central problem with awe, if
only out of sheer fear of the overpowering God who can work His
terrifying will on helpless human beings, as He had done to me.
Could anyone who pretended to know the will of God have foreseen
what He had caused me to do? In the New Testament, at any rate,
there was nothing comparable. The Old Testament, and especially
the Book of Job, might have opened my eyes in this respect, but at
that time I was not familiar enough with it. Nor had I heard anything
of the sort in the instruction for confirmation, which I was then
receiving. The fear of God, which was of course mentioned, was
considered antiquated, "Jewish," and long since superseded by the
Christian message of God's love and goodness.

The symbolism of my childhood experiences and the violence of the
imagery upset me terribly. I asked myself: "Who talks like that? Who
has the impudence to exhibit a phallus so nakedly, and in a shrine?
Who makes me think that God destroys His Church in this
abominable manner?" At last I asked myself whether it was not the
devil's doing. For that it must have been God or the devil who spoke

and acted in this way was something I never doubted. I felt
absolutely sure that it was not myself who had invented these
thoughts and images. These were the crucial experiences of my
life. It was then that it dawned on me: I must take the responsibility,
it is up to me how my fate turns out. I had been confronted with a
problem to which I had to find the answer. And who posed the
problem?

Nobody ever answered me that. I knew that I had to find the answer
out of my deepest self, that I was alone before God, and that God
alone asked me these terrible things.

From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was
assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an
inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved
itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could
rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what
God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go
my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was
no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was
"there," where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged
to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had
always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was
there. These talks with the "Other" were my profoundest
experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other
supreme ecstasy.

Naturally, I could not talk with anyone about these things. I knew of
no one to whom I might have communicated them except, possibly,
my mother. She seemed to think along somewhat similar lines as
myself. But I soon noticed that in conversation she was not
adequate for me. Her attitude toward me was above all one of
admiration, and that was not good for me. And so I remained alone
with my thoughts. On the whole, I liked that best. I played alone,

daydreamed or strolled in the woods alone, and had a secret world
of my own.

My mother was a very good mother to me. She had a hearty animal
warmth, cooked wonderfully, and was most companionable and
pleasant. She was very stout, and a ready listener. She also liked to
talk, and her chatter was like the gay plashing of a fountain. She
had a decided literary gift, as well as taste and depth. But this
quality never properly emerged; it remained hidden beneath the
semblance of a kindly, fat old woman, extremely hospitable, and
possessor of a great sense of humor.

She held all the conventional opinions a person was obliged to
have, but then her unconscious personality would suddenly put in an
appearance. That personality was unexpectedly powerful: a
somber, imposing f gure possessed of unassailable authority and
no bones about it. I was sure that she consisted of two
personalities, one innocuous and human, the other uncanny.

This other emerged only now and then, but each time it was
unexpected and frightening. She would then speak as if talking to
herself, but what she said was aimed at me and usually struck to the
core of my being, so that I was stunned into silence. The first time I
remember this happening was when I was about six years old. At
that time we had neighbors who were fairly well off. They had three
children, the eldest a boy of about my own age, and two younger
sisters. They were city folk who, especially on Sundays, dressed
their children in a manner that seemed ridiculous to me-patent-
leather shoes, white frills, little white gloves. Even on weekdays the
children were scrubbed and combed. They had fancy manners and
anxiously kept their distance from the tough, rude boy with tattered
trousers, holes in his shoes, and dirty hands. My mother annoyed
me no end with her comparisons and admonishments:

"Now look at those nice children, so well brought up and polite, but
you behave like a little lout." Such exhortations humiliated me, and I
decided to give the boy a hiding-which I did. His mother was
furious, hastened to mine and made a great to-do over my act of
violence. My mother was properly horrified and gave me a lecture,
spiced with tears, longer and more passionate than anything I had
ever heard from her before. I had not been conscious of any fault;
on the contrary, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, for it
seemed to me that I had somehow made amends for the
incongruous presence of this stranger in our village. Deeply awed
by my mother's excitement, I withdrew penitently to my table behind
our old spinet and began playing with my bricks. For some time
there was silence in the room. My mother had taken her usual seat
by the window, and was knitting. Then I heard her muttering to
herself, and from occasional words that I picked up I gathered that
she was thinking about the incident, but was now taking another
view of it.

Suddenly she said aloud, "Of course one should never have kept a
litter like that!" I realized at once that she was talking about those
"dressed-up monkeys." Her favorite brother was a hunter who kept
dogs and was always talking about dog breeding, mongrels,
purebreds, and litters. To my relief I realized that she too regarded
those odious children as inferior whelps, and that her scolding
therefore need not he taken at face value.

But I also knew, even at that age, that I must keep perfectly still and
not come out triumphantly with: "You see, you think as I dol" She
would have repudiated the idea indignantly: "You horrid boy, how
dare you pretend such a thing about your mother!" I conclude from
this that I must already have had earlier experiences of a similar
nature which I have forgotten.

I tell this story because at the time of my growing religious

skepticism there was another instance which threw light on my
mother's twofold nature. At table one day the talk turned on the
dullness of the tunes of certain hymns. A possible revision of the
hymnal was mentioned. At that my mother murmured, "O du Liebe
meiner Liebe, dn oerwrlnschte " Seligkeit" (O thou love of my love,
thou accursed bliss). As in the past I pretended that I had not heard
and was careful not to cry out in glee, in spite of my feeling of
triumph.

There was an enormous difference between my mother's two
personalities. That was why as a child I often had anxiety dreams
about her. By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed
uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same
time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear's cave. Archaic
and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. At such moments she was
the embodiment of what I have called the "natural mind."

I too have this archaic nature, and in me it is linked with the gift-not
always pleasant-of seeing people and things as they are. I can let
myself be deceived from here to Tipperary when I don't want to
recognize something, and yet at bottom I know quite well how
matters really stand. In this I am like a dog; he can be tricked, but he
always smells it out in the end. This "insight" is based on instinct, or
on a "perticipetion mystique" with others. It is as if the "eyes of the
background" do the seeing in an impersonal act of perception.

Slip of the tongue for erwunscht (longed for).

'The "natural mind" is the "mind which says absolutely straight and
ruthless things." (Seminar on Interpretation of Visions [Zitrich,
privately printed, 1940], V, p. iv.) "That is the sort of mind which
springs from natural sources, and not from opinions taken from
books; it wells up from the earth like a natural spring, and brings
with it the peculiar wisdom of nature" (Ibid., VI, p. 34.)

This was something I did not realize until much later, when some
very strange things happened to me. For instance, there was the
time when I recounted the life story of a man without knowing him. It
was at the wedding of a friend of my wife's; the bride and her family
were all entirely unknown to me. During the meal I was sitting
opposite a middle-aged gentleman with a long, handsome beard,
who had been introduced to me as a barrister. We were having an
animated conversation about criminal psychology. In order to
answer a particular question of his, I made up a story to illustrate it,
embellishing it with all sorts of details. While I was telling my story, I
noticed that a quite different expression came over the man's face,
and a silence fell on the table. Very much abashed, I stopped
speaking.

Thank heavens we were already at the dessert, so I soon stood up
and went into the lounge of the hotel. There I withdrew into a corner,
lit a cigar, and tried to think over the situation. At this moment one of
the other guests who had been sitting at my table came over and
asked reproachfully, "How did you ever come to commit such a
frightful indiscretion?" "Indiscretion?" "Why yes, that story you told."
"But I made it all up!"

To my amazement and horror it turned out that I had told the story of
the man opposite me, exactly and in all its details. I also
discovered, at this moment, that I could no longer remember a
single word of the story-even to this day I have been unable to
recall it. In his Selbstschau, Zschokke describes a similar incident:
how once, in an inn, he was able to unmask an unknown young man
as a thief, because he had seen the theft being committed before
his inner eye.

In the course of my life it has often happened to me that I suddenly
knew something which I really could not know at all. The knowledge

came to me as though it were my own idea. It was the same with my
mother. She did not know what she was saying; it was like a voice
wielding absolute authority, which said exactly what fitted the
situation.

My mother usually assumed that I was mentally far beyond

* Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke ( 1771-1848 ), Swiss author of historical
novels and Studies in Swiss and Bavarian history. Cf. Civilization in
Transition (CW 10, pm. 850).

my age, and she would talk to me as to a grown-up. It was plain that
she was telling me everything she could not say to my father, for she
early made me her confidant and confided her troubles to me. Thus,
I was about eleven years old when she informed me of a matter that
concerned my father and alarmed me greatly. I racked my brains,
and at last came to the conclusion that I must consult a certain
friend of my father's whom I knew by hearsay to be an influential
person. Without saying a word to my mother, I went into town one
afternoon after school and called at this man's house. The maid
who opened the door told me that he was out. Depressed and
disappointed, I returned home. But it was by the mercy of
providence that he was not there. Soon afterward my mother again
referred to this matter, and this time gave me a very different and
far milder picture of the situation, so that the whole thing went up in
smoke. That struck me to the quick, and I thought: "What an ass you
were to believe it, and you nearly caused a disaster with your stupid
seriousness? From then on I decided to divide everything my
mother said by two. My confidence in her was strictly limited, and
that was what prevented me from ever telling her about my deeper
preoccupations.

But then came the moments when her second personality burst
forth, and what she said on those occasions was so true and to the

point that I trembled before it. If my mother could then have been
pinned down, I would have had a wonderful Interlocutor.

With my father it was quite different. I would have liked to lay my
religious difficulties before him and ask him for advice, but I did not
do so because it seemed to me that I knew in advance what he
would be obliged to reply out of respect for his office. How right I
was in this assumption was demonstrated to me soon afterward.
My father personally gave me my instruction for confirmation. It
bored me to death. One day I was leafing through the catechism,
hoping to find something besides the sentimental-sounding and
usually incomprehensible as well as uninteresting expatiations on
Lord Jesus. I came across the paragraph on the Trinity. Here was
something that challenged my interest: a oneness which was
simultaneously a threeness.

This was a problem that fascinated me because of its inner
contradiction. I waited longingly for the moment when we would
reach this question. But when we got that far, my father said, "We
now come to the Trinity, but we'll skip that, for I really understand
nothing of it myself." I admired my father's honesty, but on the other
hand 'I was profoundly disappointed and said to myself, "There we
have it; they know nothing about it and don't give it a thought. Then
how can I talk about my secret?"

I made vain, tentative attempts with certain of my school-fellows
who struck me as reflective. I awakened no response, but, on the
contrary, a stupefaction that warned me off. In spite of the boredom,
I made every effort to believe without understanding-an attitude
which seemed to correspond with my father's-and prepared myself
for Communion, on which I had set my last hopes. This was, I
thought, merely a memorial meal, a kind of anniversary celebration
for Lord Jesus who had died 1890-30 : 1860 years ago. But still, he
had let fall certain hints such as, "Take, eat, this is my body,"

meaning that we should eat the Communion bread as if it were his
body, which after all had originally been flesh. Likewise we were to
drink the wine which had originally been blood. It was clear to me
that in this fashion we were to incorporate him into ourselves. This
seemed to me so preposterous an impossibility that I was sure
some great mystery must lie behind it, and that I would participate in
this mystery in the course of Communion, on which my father
seemed to place so high a value. As was customary, a member of
the church committee stood godfather to me. He was a nice,
taciturn old man, a wheelwright in whose workshop I had often
stood, watching his skill with lathe and adze. Now he came,
solemnly transformed by frock coat and top hat, and took me to
church, where my father in his familiar robes stood behind the altar
and read prayers from the liturgy. On the white cloth covering the
altar lay large trays filled with small pieces of bread. I could see that
the bread came from our baker, whose baked goods were
generally poor and flat in taste. From a pewter jug, wine was poured
into a pewter cup. My father ate a piece of the bread, took a
swallow of the wine-l knew the tavern from which it had come-and
passed the cup to one of the old men. All were stiff, solemn, and it
seemed to me, uninterested. I looked on in suspense, but could not
see or guess whether anything unusual was going on inside the old
men. The atmosphere was the same as that of all other
performances in church-baptisms, funerals, and so on. I had the
impression that something was being performed here, in the
traditionally correct manner. My father, too, seemed to be chiefly
concerned with going through it all according to rule, and it was part
of this rule that the appropriate words were read or spoken with
emphasis. There was no mention of the fact that it was now 1860
years since Jesus had died, whereas in all other memorial services
the date was stressed. I saw no sadness and no joy, and felt that
the feast was meager in every respect, considering the
extraordinary importance of the person whose memory was being

celebrated. It did not compare at all with secular festivals.

Suddenly my turn came. I ate the bread; it tasted flat, as I had
expected. The wine, of which I took only the smallest sip, was thin
and rather sour plainly not of the best. Then came the final prayer,
and the people went out, neither depressed nor illumined with joy,
but with faces that said, "So that's that." I walked home with my
father, intensely conscious that I was wearing a new black felt hat
and a new black suit which was already beginning to turn into a
frock coat. It was a kind of lengthened jacket that spread out into
two little wings over the seat, and between these was a slit with a
pocket into which I could tuck a handkerchief-which seemed to me
a grown-up, manly gesture. I felt socially elevated and by implication
accepted into the society of men. That day, too, Sunday dinner was
an unusually good one. I would be able to stroll about in my new suit
all day. But otherwise I was empty and did not know what I was
feeling.

Only gradually, in the course of the following days, did it dawn on
me that nothing had happened. I had reached the pinnacle of
religious initiation, had expected something-l knew not what-to
happen, and nothing at all had happened. I knew that God could do
stupendous things to me, things of fire and unearthly light; but this
ceremony contained no trace of God-not for me, at any rate. To be
sure, there had been talk about Him, but it had all amounted to no
more than words. Among the others I had noticed nothing of the
vast despair, the overpowering elation and outpouring of grace
which for me constituted the essence of God. I had observed no
sign of "communion," of "union, becoming one with..." With whom?
With jesus? Yet he was only a man who had died 1860 years ago.
Why should a person become one with him? He was called the
"Son of God"-a demigod, therefore, like the Greek heroes: how
then could an ordinary person become one with him? This was
called the "Christian religion," but none of it had anything to do with

God as I had experienced Him. On the other hand it was quite clear
that Jesus, the man, did have to do with God; he had despaired in
Gethsemane and on the cross, after having taught that God was a
kind and loving father. He too, then, must have seen the tearfulness
of God. That I could understand, but what was the purpose of this
wretched memorial service with the flat bread and the sour wine?
Slowly I came to understand that this communion had been a fatal
experience for me. It had proved hollow; more than that, it had
proved to be a total loss. I knew that I would never again be able to
participate in this ceremony. "Why, that is not religion at all," I
thought. "It is an absence of God; the church is a place I should not
go to. It is not life which is there, but death."

I was seized with the most vehement pity for my father. All at once I
understood the tragedy of his profession and his life. He was
struggling with a death whose existence he could not admit. An
abyss had opened between him and me, and I saw no possibility of
ever bridging it, for it was infinite in extent. I could not plunge my
dear and generous father, who in so many matters left me to myself
and had never tyrannized over me, to that despair and sacrilege
which were necessary for an experience of divine grace. Only God
could do that. I had no right to; it would be inhuman. God is not
human, I thought; that is His greatness, that nothing human
impinges on Him. He is kind and terrible-both at once-and is
therefore a great Peril from which everyone naturally tries to save
himself. People cling one-sidedly to His love and goodness, for fear
they will fall victim to the tempter and destroyer. Jesus, too, had
noticed that, and had therefore taught: "Lead us not into
temptation? My sense of union with the Church and with the human
world, so far as I knew it, was shattered. I had, so it seemed to me,
suffered the greatest defeat of my life. The religious outlook which I
imagined constituted my sole meaningful relation with the universe
had disintegrated; I could no longer participate in the general faith,

but found myself involved in something inexpressible, in my secret,
which I could share with no one. It was terrible and-this was the
worst of it-vulgar and ridiculous also, a diabolical mockery.

I began to ponder: What must one think of God? I had not invented
that thought about God and the cathedral, still less the dream that
had befallen me at the age of three. A stronger will than mine had
imposed both on me. Had nature been responsible? But nature
was nothing other than the will of the Creator. Nor did it help to
accuse the devil, for he too was a creature of God. God alone was
real-an annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.

What about the failure of Communion to affect me? Was that my
own failure? I had prepared for it in all earnestness, had hoped for
an experience of grace and illumination, and nothing had
happened. God had been absent. For God's sake I now found
myself cut off from the Church and from my father's and everybody
else's faith. Insofar as they all represented the Christian religion, I
was an outsider. This knowledge filled me with a sadness which
was to overshadow all the years until the time I entered the
university.

I began looking in my father's relatively modest library— which in
those days seemed impressive to me-for books that would tell me
what was known about God. At first I found only the traditional
conceptions, but not what I was seeking-a writer who thought
independently. At last I hit upon Biedermann's Christliche
Dogmotik, published in 1869. Here, apparently, was a man who
thought for himself, who worked out his own views. I learned from
him that religion was "a spiritual act consisting in man's
establishing his own relationship to God." I disagreed with that, for I
understood religion as something that God did to me; it was an act
on His part, to which I must simply yield, for He was the stronger. My
"religion" recognized no human relationship to God, for how could

anyone relate to something so little known as God? I must know
more about God in order to establish a relationship to him. In
Biedermann's chapter on "The Nature of God" I found that God
showed Himself to be a "personality to be conceived after the
analogy of the human ego: the unique, utterly supramundane ego
who embraces the entire cosmos."

As far as I knew the Bible, this definition seemed to fit. God has a
personality and is the ego of the universe, just as I myself am the
ego of my psychic and physical being. But here I encountered a
formidable obstacle. Personality, after all, surely signifies character.
Now, character is one thing and not another; that is to say, it
involves certain specific attributes. But if God is everything, how can
He still possess a distinguishable character? On the other hand, if
He does have a character, He can only be the ego of a subjective,
limited world. Moreover, what kind of character or what kind of
personality does He have? Everything depends on that, for unless
one knows the answer one cannot establish a relationship to Him.

I felt the strongest resistances to imagining God by analogy with my
own ego. That seemed to me boundlessly arrogant, if not downright
blasphemous. My ego was, in any case, difficult enough for me to
grasp. In the first place, I was aware that it consisted of two
contradictory aspects: No. 1 and No. 2. Second, in both its aspects
my ego was extremely limited, subject to all possible self-
deceptions and errors, moods, emotions, passions, and sins. It
suffered far more defeats than triumphs, was childish, vain, self-
seeking, defiant, in need of love, covetous, unjust, sensitive, lazy,
irresponsible, and so on. To my sorrow it lacked many of the virtues
and talents I admired and envied in others. How could this be the
analogy according to which we were to imagine the nature of God?

Eagerly I looked up the other characteristics of God, and found
them all listed in the way familiar to me from my instruction for

confirmation. I found that according to Article 172 "the most
immediate expression of the supramundane nature of God is 1)
negative: His invisibility to men," etc., "and 2) positive: His dwelling
in Heaven," etc. This was disastrous, for at once there rushed to my
mind the blasphemous vision which God directly or indirectly (i.e.,
via the devil) had imposed on my will.

Article 183 informed me that "God's supramundane nature with
regard to the moral world" consists in His "justice," which is not
merely "judicial" but is also "an expression of His holy being." I had
hoped that this paragraph would say something about God's dark
aspects which were giving me so much trouble: His vindictiveness,
His dangerous wrathfulness, His incomprehensible conduct toward
the creatures His omnipotence had made, whose inadequacies He
must know by virtue of that same omnipotence, and whom
moreover it pleased Him to lead astray, or at least to test, even
though He knew in advance the outcome of His experiments. What,
indeed, was God's character? What would we say of a human
personality who behaved in this manner? I did not dare to think this
question out to its conclusion. And then I read that God, "although
sufficient unto Himself and needing nothing outside Himself," had
created the world "out of His satisfaction," and "as a natural world
has filled it with His goodness and as a moral world desires to fill it
with His love."

At first I pondered over the perplexing word "satisfaction."
Satisfaction with what or with whom? Obviously with the world, for
He had looked upon His work and called it good. But it was just this
that I had never understood. Certainly the world is immeasurably
beautiful, but it is quite as horrible. In a small village in the country,
where there are few people and nothing much happens, "old age,
disease, and death" are experienced more intensely, in greater
detail, and more nakedly than elsewhere. Although I was not yet
sixteen years old I had seen a great deal of the reality of the life of

man and beast, and in church and school I had heard enough of the
sufferings and corruption of the world. God could at most have felt
"satisfaction" with paradise, but then He Himself had taken good
care that the glory of paradise should not last too long by planting in
it that poisonous serpent, the devil. Had He taken satisfaction in
that too?

I felt certain that Biedermann did not mean this, but was simply
babbling on in that mindless way that characterized religious
instruction, not even aware that he was writing nonsense. As I saw
it, it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that God, for all that He
probably did not feel any such cruel satisfaction in the unmerited
sufferings of man and beast, had nevertheless intended to create a
world of contradictions in which one creature devoured another and
life meant simply being born to die. The "wonderful harmonies" of
natural law looked to me more like a chaos tamed by fearful effort,
and the "eternal" starry firmament with its predetermined orbits
seemed plainly an accumulation of random bodies without order or
meaning. For no one could really see the constellations people
spoke about. They were mere arbitrary configurations.

I either did not see or gravely doubted that God filled the natural
world with His goodness. This, apparently, was another of those
points which must not be reasoned about but must be believed. In
fact, if God is the highest good, why is the world, His creation, so
imperfect, so corrupt, so pitiable? "Obviously it has been infected
and thrown into confusion by the devil," I thought. But the devil, too,
was a creature of God. I had to read up on the devil. He seemed to
be highly important after all. I again opened Biedermann's book on
Christian dogmatics and looked for the answer to this burning
question. What were the reasons for suffering, imperfection, and
evil? I could find nothing.

That finished it for me. This weighty tome on dogmatics was nothing

but fancy drivel; worse still, it was a fraud or a specimen of
uncommon stupidity whose sole aim was to obscure the truth. I was
disillusioned and even indignant, and once more seized with pity for
my father, who had fallen victim to this mumbo-jumbo.

But somewhere and at some time there must have been people
who sought the truth as I was doing, who thought rationally and did
not wish to deceive themselves and others and deny the sorrowful
reality of the world. It was about this time that my mother, or rather,
her No. 2 personality, suddenly and without preamble said, "You
must read Goethe's Faust one of these days." We had a handsome
edition of Goethe, and I picked out Faust. It poured into my soul like
a miraculous balm. "Here at last," I thought, "is someone who takes
the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him-with
the adversary who has the power to frustrate God's plan to make a
perfect world." I regretted Faust's behavior, for to my mind he
should not have been so one-sided and so easily tricked. He should
have been cleverer and also more moral. How childish he was to
gamble away his soul so frivolously! Faust was plainly a bit of a
windbag. I had the impression that the weight of the drama and its
significance lay chiefly on the side of Mephistopheles. It would not
have grieved me if Faust's soul had gone to hell. He deserved it. I
did not like the idea of the "cheated devil" at the end, for after all
Mephistopheles had been anything but a stupid devil, and it was
contrary to logic for him to be tricked by silly little angels.
Mephistopheles seemed to me cheated in quite a different sense:
he had not received his promised rights because Faust, that
somewhat characterless fellow, had carried his swindle through
right into the Hereafter. There, admittedly, his puerility came to light,
but, as I saw it, he did not deserve the initiation into the great
mysteries. I would have given him a taste of purgatorial fires. The
real problem, it seemed to me, lay with Mephistopheles, whose
whole figure made the deepest impression on me, and who, I

vaguely sensed, had a relationship to the mystery of the Mothers. At
any rate Mephistopheles and the great initiation at the end
remained for me a wonderful and mysterious experience on the
fringes of my conscious world.

At last I had found confirmation that there were or had been people
who saw evil and its universal power, and-more important-the
mysterious role it played in delivering man from darkness and
suffering. To that extent Goethe became, in my eyes, a prophet. But
I could not forgive him for having dismissed Mephistopheles by a
mere trick, by a bit of jiggery-pokery.

* "Faust, Part Two, trans, by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, England,
Penguin Books Ltd, 1959), pp. 76ff. 60

For me that was too theological, too frivolous and irresponsible,
and I was deeply sorry that Goethe too had fallen for those cunning
devices by which evil is rendered innocuous. In reading the drama I
had discovered that Faust had been a philosopher of sorts, and
although he turned away from philosophy, he had obviously learned
from it a certain receptivity to the truth. Hitherto I had heard virtually
nothing of philosophy, and now a new hope dawned. Perhaps, I
thought, there were philosophers who had grappled with these
questions and could shed light on them for me.

Since there were no philosophers in my father's library-they were
suspect because they thought— I had to content myself with Krug's
General Dictionary of the Philosophical Sciences, second edition,
1832; I plunged forthwith into the article on God. To my discontent it
began with the etymology of the word "God," which, it said,
"incontestably" derived from "good" and signified the ens summum
or perfectissimum. The existence of God could not be proved, it
continued, nor the innateness of the idea of God. The latter,
however, could exist a priori in man, if not in actuality at any rate

potentially. In any case our "intellectual powers" must "already be
developed to a certain degree before they are capable of
engendering so sublime an idea."

This explanation astounded me beyond measure. What is wrong
with these "philosophers"? I wondered. Evidently they know of God
only by hearsay. The theologians are different in this respect, at any
rate; at least they are sure that God exists, even though they make
contradictory statements about Him. This lexicographer Krug
expresses himself in so involved a manner that it is easy to see he
would like to assert that he is already sufficiently convinced of God's
existence. Then why doesn't he say so outright? Why does he
pretend-as if he really thought that we "engender" the idea of God,
and to do so must first have reached a certain level of
development? So far as I knew, even the savages wandering naked
in their jungles had such ideas. And they were certainly not
"philosophers" who sat down to "engender an idea of God." I never
engendered any idea of God, either. Of course God cannot be
proved, for how could, say, a clothes moth that eats Australian wool
prove to other moths that Australia exists? God's existence does
not depend on our proofs. How had I arrived at my certainty about
God? I was told all sorts of things about Him, yet I could believe
nothing. None of it convinced me. That was not where my idea
came from. In fact it was not an idea at ail-that is, not something
thought out. It was not like imagining something and thinking it out
and afterward believing it. For example, all that about Lord Jesus
was always suspect to me and I never really believed it, although it
was impressed upon me far more than God, who was usually only
hinted at in the background. Why have I come to take God for
granted? Why do these philosophers pretend that God is an idea, a
kind of arbitrary assumption which they can engender or not, when it
is perfectly plain that He exists, as plain as a brick that falls on your
head?

Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the
most certain and immediate of experiences. After all, I didn't invent
that horrible image about the cathedral. On the contrary, it was
forced on me and I was compelled, with the utmost cruelty, to think
it, and afterward that inexpressible feeling of grace came to me. I
had no control over these things. I came to the conclusion that there
must be something the matter with these philosophers, for they had
the curious notion that God was a kind of hypothesis that could be
discussed. I also found it extremely unsatisfying that the
philosophers offered no opinions or explanations about the dark
deeds of God. These, it seemed to me, merited special attention
and consideration from philosophy, since they constituted a
problem which, I gathered, was rather a hard one for the
theologians. All the greater was my disappointment to discover that
the philosophers had apparently never even heard of it.

I therefore passed on to the next topic that interested me, the article
on the devil. If I read, we conceived of the devil as originally evil, we
would become entangled in patent contradictions, that is to say we
would fall into dualism. Therefore we would do better to assume that
the devil was originally created a good being but had been
corrupted by his pride. However; as the author of the article pointed
out-and I was glad to see this point made-this hypothesis
presupposed the evil it was attempting to explain-namely, pride.
For the rest, he continued, the origin of evil was "unexplained and
inexplicable"-which meant to me: Like the theologians, he does not
want to think about it. The article on evil and its origin proved
equally unilluminating.

The account I have given here summarizes trains of thought and
developments of ideas which, broken by long, intervals, extended
over several years. They went on exclusively in my No. 2
personality, and were strictly private. I used my father's library for

these researches, secretly and without asking his permission. In the
intervals, personality No. 1 openly read all the novels of Gerstacker,
and German translations of the classic English novels. I also began
reading German literature, concentrating on those classics which
school, with its needlessly laborious explanations of the obvious,
had not spoiled for me. I read vastly and planlessly, drama, poetry,
history, and later natural science. Reading was not only interesting
but provided a welcome and beneficial distraction from the
preoccupations of personality No. 2., which in increasing measure
were leading me to depressions. For everywhere in the realm of
religious questions I encountered only locked doors, and if ever one
door should chance to open I was disappointed by what lay behind
it. Other people all seemed to have totally different concerns. I felt
completely alone with my certainties. More than ever I wanted
someone to talk with, but nowhere did I find a point of contact; on
the contrary, I sensed in others an estrangement, a distrust, an
apprehension which robbed me of speech. That, too, depressed
me. I did not know what to make of it. Why has no one had
experiences similar to mine? I wondered. Why is there nothing
about it in scholarly books? Am I the only one who has had such
experiences? Why should I be the only one? It never occurred to me
that I might be crazy, for the light and darkness of God seemed to
me facts that could be understood even though they oppressed my
feelings.

I felt the singularity into which I was being forced as something
threatening, for it meant isolation, and that seemed all the more
unpleasant to me as I was unjustly taken for a scapegoat a good
deal more often than I liked. Moreover, something had happened in
school to increase my isolation. In the German class I was rather
mediocre, for the subject matter, especially German grammar and
syntax, did not interest me at all. I was lazy and bored. The subjects
for composition usually seemed to me shallow or silly, and my

essays turned out accordingly: either careless or labored. I slipped
through with average marks, and this suited me very well, as it fitted
in with my general tendency not to be conspicuous. On the whole I
sympathized with boys from poor families who, like myself, had
come from nowhere, and I had a liking for those who were none too
bright, though I tended to become excessively irritated by their
stupidity and ignorance. For the fact of the matter was that they had
something to offer which I craved deeply: in their simplicity they
noticed nothing unusual about me. My "unusualness" was gradually
beginning to give me the disagreeable, rather uncanny feeling that I
must possess repulsive traits, of which I was not aware, that caused
my teachers and schoolmates to shun me.

In the midst of these preoccupations the following incident burst on
me like a thunderclap. We had been assigned a subject for
composition which for once interested me. Consequently I set to
work with a will and produced what seemed to me a carefully written
and successful paper. I hoped to receive at least one of the highest
marks for it— not the highest, of course, for that would have made
me conspicuous, but one close to the top. Our teacher was in the
habit of discussing the compositions in order of merit. The first one
he turned to was by the boy at the head of the class. That was all
right. Then followed the compositions of the others, and I waited
and waited in vain for my name. Still it did not come. "It just can't
be," I thought, "that mine is so bad that it is even below these poor
ones he has come to. What can be the matter?" Was I simply hors
concours-which would mean being isolated and attracting attention
in the most dreadful way of all?

When all the essays had been read, the teacher paused. Then he
said, "Now I have one more composition-Jung's. It is by far the
best, and I ought to have given it first place. But unfortunately it is a
fraud. Where did you copy it from? Confess the truth!"

I shot to my feet, as horrified as I was furious, and cried, "I did not
copy it! I went to a lot of trouble to write a good composition." But
the teacher shouted at me, "You're lyingl You could never write a
composition like this. No one is going to believe that. Now-where
did you copy it from?"

Vainly I swore to my innocence. The teacher clung to his theory. He
became threatening. "I can tell you this: if I knew where you had
copied it from, you would be chucked out of the school." And he
turned away. My classmates threw odd glances at me, and I
realized with horror that they were thinking, "A-ha, so that's the way
it is." My protestations fell on deaf ears.

I felt that from now on I was branded, and that all the paths which
might have led me out of unusualness had been cut off. Profoundly
disheartened and dishonored, I swore vengeance on the teacher,
and if I had had an opportunity something straight out of the law of
the jungle would have resulted. How in the world could I possibly
prove that I had not copied the essay?

For days I turned this incident over in my thoughts, and again and
again came to the conclusion that I was powerless, the sport of a
blind and stupid fate that had marked me as a liar and a cheat. Now
I realized many things I had not previously understood-for example,
how it was that one of the teachers could say to my father, who had
inquired about my conduct in school, "Oh, he's just average, but he
works commendably hard." I was thought to be relatively stupid and
superficial. That did not annoy me really. But what made me furious
was that they should think me capable of cheating, and thus morally
destroy me.

My grief and rage threatened to get out of control. And then
something happened that I had already observed in myself several
times before: there was a sudden inner silence, as though a

soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room. It was as if a
mood of cool curiosity came over me, and I asked myself, "What is
really going on here? All right, you are excited. Of course the
teacher is an idiot who doesn't understand your nature-that is,
doesn't understand it any more than you do. Therefore he is as
mistrustful as you are. You distrust yourself and others, and that is
why you side with those who are naive, simple, and easily seen
through. One gets excited when one doesn't understand things."

In the light of these considerations 'sine ira et studio', I was struck
by the analogy with that other train of ideas which had impressed
itself on me so forcefully when I did not want to think the forbidden
thought. Although at that time I doubtless saw no difference as yet
between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, and still claimed the world
of No. 2 as my own personal world, there was always, deep in the
background, the feeling that something other than myself was
involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and
endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly
entered the room-the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet
was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future.
Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen.

At that time, of course, I could never have expressed myself in this
fashion, nor am I now attributing to my state of consciousness
something that was not there at the time. I am only trying to express
the feelings I had then, and to shed light on that twilight world with
the help of what I know now.

It was some months after the incident just described that my
schoolmates hung the nickname "Father Abraham" on me. No. 1
could not understand why, and thought it silly and ridiculous. Yet
somewhere in the background I felt that the name had hit the mark.
All allusions to this background were painful to me, for the more I
read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew

my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality
belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I
had grown up with in the country, among rivers and woods, among
men and animals in a small village bathed in sunlight, with the winds
and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in
which uncertain things happened. It was no mere locality on the
map, but "God's world," so ordered by Him and filled with secret
meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the
animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it. That was
evident, for example, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in
the resigned eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so
desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of
the cats who had chosen house and barn as their residence and
hunting ground. People were like the animals, and seemed as
unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into
the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what
purpose; like annuals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not
see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God's world, in an
eternity where everything is already born and everything has already
died.

Because they are so closely akin to us and share our
unknowing ness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls
like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive
understanding. We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate,
hunger and thirst, fear and trust in common-all the essential
features of existence with the exception of speech, sharpened
consciousness, and science. And although I admired science in the
conventional way, I also saw it giving rise to alienation and
aberration from God's world, as leading to a degeneration which
animals were not capable of. Animals were dear and faithful,
unchanging and trustworthy. People I now distrusted more than
ever.

Insects I did not regard as proper animals, and I took coldblooded
vertebrates to be a rather lowly intermediate stage on the way down
to the insects. Creatures in this category were objects for
observation and collection, curiosities merely, alien and extra-
human; they were manifestations of impersonal life and more akin
to plants than to human beings.

The earthly manifestations of "God's world" began with the realm of
plants, as a kind of direct communication from it. It was as though
one were peering over the shoulder of the Creator, who, thinking
Himself unobserved, was making toys and decorations. Man and
the proper animals, on the other hand, were bits of God that had
become independent. That was why they could move about on their
own and choose their abodes. Plants were bound for good or ill to
their places. They expressed not only the beauty but also the
thoughts of God's world, with no intent of their own and without
deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me
direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For
that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its
deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.

This impression was reinforced when I became acquainted with
Gothic cathedrals. But there the infinity of the cosmos, the chaos of
meaning and meaninglessness, of impersonal purpose and
mechanical law, were wrapped in stone. This contained and at the
same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of
spirit. What I dimly felt to be my kinship with stone was the divine
nature in both, in the dead and the living matter.

At that time it would, as I have said, have been beyond my powers
to formulate my feelings and intuition in any graphic way, for they all
occurred in No. 2 personality, while my active and comprehending
ego remained passive and was absorbed into the sphere of the
"old man," who belonged to the centuries. I experienced him and

his influence in a curiously unreflective manner; when he was
present, No. 1 personality paled to the point of nonexistence, and
when the ego that became increasingly identical with No. 1
personality dominated the scene, the old man, if remembered at all,
seemed a remote and unreal dream.

Between my sixteenth and nineteenth years the fog of my dilemma
slowly lifted, and my depressive states of mind improved. No. 1
personality emerged more and more distinctly. School and city life
took up my time, and my increased knowledge gradually
permeated or repressed the world of intuitive premonitions. I began
systematically pursuing questions I had consciously framed. I read a
brief introduction to the history of philosophy and in this way gained
a bird's-eye view of everything that had been thought in this field. I
found to my gratification that many of my intuitions had historical
analogues. Above all I was attracted to the thought of Pythagoras,
Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Plato, despite the long-windedness of
Socratic argumentation. Their ideas were beautiful and academic,
like pictures in a gallery, but somewhat remote. Only in Meister
Eckhart did I feel the breath of life— not that I understood him. The
Schoolmen left me cold, and the Aristotelian intellectualism of St.
Thomas appeared to me more lifeless than a desert. I thought,
"They all want to force something to come out by tricks of logic,
something they have not been granted and do not really know
about. They want to prove a belief to themselves, whereas actually it
is a matter of experience? They seemed to me like people who
knew by hearsay that elephants existed, but had never seen one,
and were now trying to prove by arguments that on logical grounds
such animals must exist and must be constituted as in fact they are.
For obvious reasons, the critical philosophy of the eighteenth
century at first did not appeal to me at all. Of the nineteenth-century
philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it
was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed

to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words
and was pompously gesticulating in his prison.

But the great find resulting from my researches was Schopenhauer.
He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly
and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil-all those
things which the others hardly seemed to notice and always tried to
resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. Here at
last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not
for the best in the fundaments of the universe. He spoke neither of
the all-good and all-wise providence of a Creator, nor of the
harmony of the cosmos, but stated bluntly that a fundamental flaw
underlay the sorrowful course of human history and the cruelty of
nature: the blindness of the world-creating Will. This was confirmed
not only by the early observations I had made of diseased and
dying f shes, of mangy foxes, frozen or starved birds, of the pitiless
tragedies concealed in a flowery meadow: earthworms tormented
to death by ants, insects that tore each other apart piece by piece,
and so on. My experiences with human beings, too, had taught me
anything rather than a belief in man's original goodness and
decency. I knew myself well enough to know that I was only
gradually, as it were, distinguishing myself from an animal.

Schopenhauer's somber picture of the world had my undivided
approval, but not his solution of the problem. I felt sure that by "Will"
he really meant God, the Creator, and that he was saying that God
was blind. Since I knew from experience that God was not offended
by any blasphemy, that on the contrary He could even encourage it
because He wished to evoke not only man's bright and positive
side but also his darkness and ungodliness, Schopenhauer's view
did not distress me. I considered it a verdict justified by the facts.
But I was all the more disappointed by his theory that the intellect
need only confront the blind Will with its image in order to cause it to
reverse itself. How could the Will see this image at all, since it was

blind? And why should it, even if it could see, thereby be persuaded
to reverse itself, since the image would show it precisely what it
willed? And what was the intellect? It was a function of the human
soul, not a mirror but an infinitesimal fragment of a mirror such as a
child might hold up to the sun, expecting the sun to be dazzled by it.
I was puzzled that Schopenhauer should ever have been satisfied
with such an inadequate answer.

Because of this I was impelled to study him more thoroughly, and I
became increasingly impressed by his relation to Kant. I therefore
began reading the works of this philosopher, above all his Critique
of Pure Reason, which put me to some hard thinking. My efforts
were rewarded, for I discovered the fundamental flaw, so I thought,
in Schopenhauer's system. He had committed the deadly sin of
hypostatizing a metaphysical assertion, and of endowing a mere
noumenon, a Ding an sich, with special qualities. I got this from
Kant's theory of knowledge, and it afforded me an even greater
illumination, if that were possible, than Schopenhauer's
"pessimistic" view of the world.

This philosophical development extended from my seventeenth
year until well into the period of my medical studies. It brought about
a revolutionary alteration of my attitude to the world and to life.
Whereas formerly I had been shy, timid, mistrustful, pallid, thin, and
apparently unstable in health, I now began to display a tremendous
appetite on all fronts. I knew what I wanted and went after it. I also
became noticeably more accessible and more communicative. I
discovered that poverty was no handicap and was far from being
the principal reason for suffering; that the sons of the rich really did
not enjoy any advantages over the poor and ill-clad boys. There
were far deeper reasons for happiness and unhappiness than one's
allotment of pocket money. I made more and better friends than
before. I felt firmer ground under my feet and even summoned up

courage to speak openly of my ideas. But that, as I discovered all
too soon, was a misunderstanding which I had cause to regret. For I
met not only with embarrassment or mockery, but with hostile
rejection. To my consternation and discomf ture, I found that certain
people considered me a braggart, a poseur, and a humbug. The
old charge of cheat was revived, even though in a somewhat milder
form. Once again it had to do with a subject for composition that
had aroused my interest. I had worked out my paper with particular
care, taking the greatest pains to polish my style. The result was
crushing. "Here is an essay by Jung," said the teacher. "It is
downright brilliant, but tossed off so carelessly that it is easy to see
how little serious effort went into it. I can tell you this, Jung, you won't
get through life with that slapdash attitude. Life calls for earnestness
and conscientiousness, work and effort. Look at D.'s paper. He has
none of your brilliance, but he is honest, conscientious, and hard-
working. That is the way to success in life."

My feelings were not as hurt as on the first occasion, for in spite of
himself the teacher had been impressed by my essay, and had at
least not accused me of stealing it. I protested against his
reproaches, but was dismissed with the comment: "The Ars
Poetico maintains that the best poem is the one which conceals the
effort of creation. But you cannot make me believe that about your
essay, for it was tossed off frivolously and without any effort." There
were, I knew, a few good ideas in it, but the teacher did not even
bother to discuss them.

I felt some bitterness over this incident, but the suspicions of my
schoohnates were a far more serious matter, for they threatened to
throw me back into my former isolation and depression. I racked my
brains, trying to understand what I could have done to deserve their
slanders. By cautious inquiries I discovered that they looked
askance at me because I often made remarks, or dropped hints,
about things which I could not possibly know. For instance, I

pretended to know something about Kant and Schopenhauer, or
about paleontology, which we had not even had in school as yet.
These astonishing discoveries showed me that practically all the
burning questions had nothing to do with everyday life, but
belonged, like my ultimate secret, to "God's world," which it was
better not to speak of.

Henceforth I took care not to mention these esoteric matters among
my schoolmates, and among the adults of my acquaintance I knew
no one with whom I might have talked without risk of being thought a
boaster and impostor. The most painful thing of all was the
frustration of my attempts to overcome the inner split in myself, my
division into two worlds. Again and again events occurred which
forced me out of my ordinary, everyday existence into the
boundlessness of "God's world."

This expression, "God's world," may sound sentimental to some
ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To "God's world"
belonged everything superhuman-dazzling light, the darkness of
the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the
uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. "God," for
me, was everything-and anything but "edifying."

The older I grew, the more frequently I was asked by my parents
and others what I wanted to be. I had no clear notions on that score.
My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was
powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the
other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative
religion. In the sciences I was drawn principally to zoology,
paleontology, and geology; in the humanities to Greco-Roman,
Egyptian, and prehistoric archaeology. At that time, of course, I did
not realize how very much this choice of the most varied subjects
corresponded to the nature of my inner dichotomy. What appealed
to me in science were the concrete facts and their historical

background, and in comparative religion the spiritual problems, into
which philosophy also entered. In science I missed the factor of
meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Science met, to a very
large extent, the needs of No. 1 personality, whereas the humane or
historical studies provided beneficial instruction for No. 2.

Torn between these two poles, I was for a long time unable to settle
on anything. I noticed that my uncle, the head of my mother's family,
who was pastor of St. Alban's in Basel, was gently pushing me in
the direction of theology. The unusual attentiveness with which I had
followed a conversation at table, when he was discussing a point of
religion with one of his sons, all of whom were theologians, had not
escaped him. I wondered whether there might possibly be
theologians who were in close touch with the dizzy heights of the
university and therefore knew more than my father. Such
conversations never gave me the impression that they were
concerned with real experiences, and certainly not with experiences
like mine. They dealt exclusively with doctrinal opinions on the
Biblical narratives, all of which made me feel distinctly
uncomfortable, because of the numerous and barely credible
accounts of miracles.

While I was attending the Gymnasium I was allowed to lunch at this
uncle's house every Thursday. I was grateful to him not only for the
lunch but for the unique opportunity of occasionally hearing at his
table an adult, intelligent, and intellectual conversation. It was a
marvelous experience for me to discover that anything of this sort
existed at all, for in my home surroundings I had never heard
anyone discussing learned topics. I did sometimes attempt to talk
seriously with my father, but encountered an impatience and
anxious defensiveness which puzzled me. Not until several years
later did I come to understand that my poor father did not dare to
think, because he was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking
refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith. He could

not receive it as a grace because he wanted to "win it by struggle,"
forcing it to come with convulsive efforts.

My uncle and my cousins could calmly discuss the dogmas and
doctrines of the Church Fathers and the opinions of modem
theologians. They seemed safely ensconced in a self-evident world
order, in which the name of Nietzsche did not occur at all and Jakob
Burckhardt was paid only a grudging compliment. Burckhardt was
"liberal," "rather too much of a freethinker"; I gathered that he stood
somewhat askew in the eternal order of things. My uncle, I knew,
never suspected how remote I was from theology, and I was deeply
sorry to have to disappoint him. I would never have dared to lay my
problems before him, since I knew only too well how disastrously
this would turn out for me. I had nothing to say in my defense. On the
contrary, No. 1 personality was fast taking the lead, and my
scientific knowledge, though still meager, was thoroughly saturated
with the scientific materialism of the time. It was only painfully held in
check by the evidence of history and by Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason, which apparently nobody in my environment understood.
For although Kant was mentioned by my theologian uncle and
cousins in tones of praise, his principles were used only to discredit
opposing views but were never applied to their own. About this, too,
I said nothing.

Consequently, I began to feel more and more uncomfortable when I
sat down to table with my uncle and his family. Given my habitually
guilty conscience, these Thursdays became black days for me. In
this world of social and spiritual security and ease I felt less and
less at home, although I thirsted for the drops of intellectual
stimulation which occasionally trickled forth. I felt dishonest and
ashamed. I had to admit to myself: "Yes, you are a cheat; you lie
and deceive people who mean well by you. It's not their fault that
they live in a world of social and intellectual certitudes, that they
know nothing of poverty, that their religion is also their paid

profession, that they are totally unconscious of the fact that God
Himself can wrench a person out of his orderly spiritual world and
condemn him to blaspheme. I have no way of explaining this to
them. I must take the odium on myself and learn to bear it."
Unfortunately, I had so far been singularly unsuccessful in this
endeavor.

As the tensions of this moral conflict increased, No. 2 personality
became more and more doubtful and distasteful to me, and I could
no longer hide this fact from myself. I tried to extinguish No. 2, but
could not succeed in that either. At school and in the presence of
my friends I could forget him, and he also disappeared when I was
studying science. But as soon as I was by myself, at home or out in
the country, Schopenhauer and Kant returned in full force, and with
them the grandeur of "God's world." My scientific knowledge also
formed a part of it, and filled the great canvas with vivid colors and
figures. Then No. 1 and his worries about the choice of a profession
sank below the horizon, a tiny episode in the last decade of the
nineteenth century. But when I returned from my expedition into the
centuries, I brought with me a kind of hangover. I, or rather No. 1,
lived in the here and now, and sooner or later would have to form a
definite idea of what profession he wished to pursue.

Several times my father had a serious talk with me. I was free to
study anything I liked, he said, but if I wanted his advice I should
keep away from theology. "Be anything you like except a
theologian," he said emphatically. By this time there was a tacit
agreement between us that certain things could be said or done
without comment. He had never taken me to task for cutting church
as often as possible and for not going to communion any more. The
farther away I was from church, the better I felt. The only things I
missed were the organ and the choral music, but certainly not the
"religious community? The phrase meant nothing to me at all, for

the habitual churchgoers struck me as being far less of a
community than the "worldly" folk. The latter may have been less
virtuous, but on the other hand they were much nicer people, with
natural emotions, more sociable and cheerful, warmer-hearted and
more sincere.

I was able to reassure my father that I had not the slightest desire to
be a theologian. But I continued to waver between science and the
humanities. Both powerfully attracted me. I was beginning to realize
that No. 2 had no pied-a-terre. In him I was lifted beyond the here
and now; in him I felt myself a single eye in a thousand-eyed
universe, but incapable of moving so much as a pebble upon the
earth. No. 1 rebelled against this passivity; he wanted to be up and
doing, but for the present he was caught in an insoluble conflict.
Obviously I had to wait and see what would happen. If anyone
asked me what I wanted to be I was in the habit of replying: a
philologist, by which I secretly meant Assyrian and Egyptian
archaeology. In reality, however, I continued to study science and
philosophy in my leisure hours, and particularly during the holidays,
which I spent at home with my mother and sister. The days were
long past when I ran to my mother, lamenting, "I'm bored, I don't
know what to do." Holidays were now the best time of the year,
when I could amuse myself alone. Moreover, during the summer
vacations at least, my father was away, as he used regularly to
spend his holidays in Sachseln.

Only once did it happen that I too went on a vacation trip. I was
fourteen when, on our doctor's orders, I was sent to Entlebuch for a
cure, in the hope that my fitful appetite and my then unstable health
would be improved. For the first time I was alone among adult
strangers. I was quartered in the Catholic priest's house. For me
this was an eerie and at the same time fascinating adventure. I
seldom got a glimpse of the priest himself, and his housekeeper
was scarcely an alarming person, though prone to be curt. Nothing

in the least menacing happened to me. I was under the supervision
of an old country doctor who ran a kind of hotel-sanatorium for
convalescents of all types. It was a very mixed group: farm people,
minor officials, merchants, and a few cultivated people from Basel,
among them a chemist who had attained that pinnacle of glory, the
doctorate. My father, too, was a Ph.D., but he was merely a
philologist and linguist. This chemist was a fascinating novelty to
me: here was a scientist, perhaps one of those who understood the
secrets of stones. He was still a young man and taught me to play
croquet, but he imparted to me none of his presumably vast
learning. And I was too shy, too awkward, and far too ignorant to
ask him. I revered him as the first person I had ever met in the flesh
who was initiated into the secrets of nature, or some of them, at
least. He sat at the same table with me, ate the same food as I did,
and occasionally even exchanged a few words with me. I felt
transported into the sublimer sphere of adulthood. This elevation in
my status was confirmed when I was permitted to go on the outings
arranged for the boarders. On one of these occasions we visited a
distillery, and were invited to sample the wares. In literal fulfillment of
the verse:

But now there comes a kicker,
This stuff, you see, is liquor [6]

6 Wilhelm Busch, Die lobsiade.

I found the various little glasses so inspiring that I was wafted into
an entirely new and unexpected state of consciousness. There was
no longer any inside or outside, no longer an "I" and the "others,"
No. 1 and No. 2 were no more; caution and timidity were gone, and
the earth and sky, the universe and everything in it that creeps and
flies, revolves, rises, or falls, had all become one. I was shamefully,
gloriously, triumphantly drunk. It was as if I were drowned in a sea of
blissful musings, but, because of the violent heaving of the waves,

had to cling with eyes, hands, and feet to all solid objects in order to
keep my balance on the swaying streets and between the rocking
houses and trees. "Marvelous," I thought, "only unfortunately just a
little too much." The experience came to a rather woeful end, but it
nevertheless remained a discovery, a premonition of beauty and
meaning which I had spoiled only by my stupidity.

At the end of my stay my father came to fetch me, and we traveled
together to Lucerne, where-what happinessl-we went aboard a
steamship. I had never seen anything like it. I could not see enough
of the action of the steam engine, and then suddenly I was told we
had arrived in Vitznau. Above the village towered a high mountain,
and my father now explained to me that this was the Rigi, and that a
cogwheel railway ran up it. We went to a small station building, and
there stood the strangest locomotive in the world, with the boiler
upright but tilted at a queer angle. Even the seats in the carriage
were tilted. My father pressed a ticket into my hand and said, "You
can ride up to the peak alone. I'll stay here, it's too expensive for the
two of us. Be careful not to fall down anywhere."

I was speechless with joy. Here I was at the foot of this mighty
mountain, higher than any I had ever seen, and quite close to the
fiery peaks of my faraway childhood. I was, indeed, almost a man
by now. For this trip I had bought myself a bamboo cane and an
English jockey cap-the proper articles of dress for a World traveler.
And now I was to ascend this enormous mountain! I no longer knew
which was bigger, I or the mountain. With a tremendous puffing, the
wonderful locomotive shook and rattled me up to the dizzy heights
where ever-new abysses and Panoramas opened out before my
gaze, until at last I stood on the peak in the strange thin air, looking
into unimaginable distances. "Yes," I thought, "this is it, my world,
the real world, the secret, where there are no teachers, no schools,
no unanswerable questions, where one can be without having to
ask anything." I kept carefully to the paths, for there were

tremendous precipices all around. It was all very solemn, and I felt
one had to be polite and silent up here, for one was in God's world.
Here it was physically present. This was the best and most precious
gift my father had ever given me.

So profound was the impression this made upon me that my
memories of everything that happened afterward in "God's world"
were completely blotted out. But No. 1 also came into his own on
this trip, and his impressions remained with me for the rest of my
life. I still see myself, grown up and independent, wearing a stiff
black hat and with an expensive cane, sitting on the terrace of one
of the overwhelmingly elegant palatial hotels beside Lake Lucerne,
or in the beautiful gardens of Vitznau, having my morning coffee at a
small, white-covered table under a striped awning spangled with
sunlight, eating croissants with golden butter and various kinds of
jam, and considering plans for outings that would fill the whole long
summer day. After the coffee I would stroll calmly, without
excitement and at a deliberate pace, to a steamship, which would
carry me toward the Gotthard and the foot of those giant mountains
whose tops were covered with gleaming glaciers.

For many decades this image rose up whenever I was wearied
from overwork and sought a point of rest. In real life I have promised
myself this splendor again and again, but I have never kept my
promise.

This, my first conscious journey, was followed by a second a year or
two later. I had been allowed to visit my father, who was on holiday
in Sachseln. From him I learned the impressive news that he had
become friendly with the Catholic priest there. This seemed to me
an act of extraordinary boldness, and secretly I admired my father's
courage. While there, I paid a visit to the hermitage of Flueli and the
relics of Brother Klaus, who by then had been beatified. I wondered
how the Catholics knew that he was in a beatific state. Perhaps he

was still wandering about and had told people so? I was powerfully
impressed by the genius loci, and was able not only to imagine the
possibility of a life so entirely dedicated to God but even to
understand it. But I did so with an inward shudder and a question to
which I knew no answer: How could his wife and children have
borne having a saint for a husband and father, when it was precisely
my father's faults and inadequacies that made him particularly
lovable to me? "Yes," I thought, "how could anyone live with a
saint?" Obviously he saw that it was impossible, and therefore he
had to become a hermit. Still, it was not so very far from his cell to
his house. This wasn't a bad idea, I thought, to have the family in
one house, while I would live some distance away, in a hut with a
pile of books and a writing table, and an open fire where I would
roast chestnuts and cook my soup on a tripod. As a holy hermit I
wouldn't have to go to church any more, but would have my own
private chapel instead.

From the hermitage I strolled on up the hill, lost in my thoughts, and
was just turning to descend when from the left the slender figure of a
young girl appeared. She wore the local costume, had a pretty face,
and greeted me with friendly blue eyes. As though it were the most
natural thing, in the world we descended into the valley together.
She was about my own age. Since I knew no other girls except my
cousins, I felt rather embarrassed and did not know how to talk to
her. So I began hesitantly explaining that I was here for a couple of
days on holiday, that I was at the Gymnasium in Basel and later
wanted to study at the university. While I was talking, a strange
feeling of fatefulness crept over me. "She has appeared just at this
moment," I thought to myself, "and she walks along with me as
naturally as if we belonged together? I glanced sideways at her and
saw an expression of mingled shyness and admiration in her face,
which embarrassed me and somehow pierced me. Can it be
possible, I wondered, that this is fate? Is my meeting her mere

chance? A peasant girl-could it possibly be? She is a Catholic, but
perhaps her priest is the very one with whom my father has made
friends? She has no idea who I am. I certainly couldn't talk to her
about Schopenhauer and the negation of the Will, could I? Yet she
doesn't seem in any way sinister. Perhaps her Priest is not one of
those Jesuits skulking about in black robes.

But I cannot tell her, either, that my father is a Protestant clergyman.
That might frighten or offend her. And to talk about philosophy, or
about the devil, who is more important than Faust even though
Goethe made such a simpleton of him-that is quite out of the
question. She still dwells in the distant land of innocence, but I have
plunged into reality, into the splendor and cruelty of creation. How
can she endure to hear about that? An impenetrable wall stands
between us. There is not and cannot be any relationship.

Sad at heart, I retreated into myself and turned the conversation to
less dangerous topics. Was she going to Sachseln, wasn't the
weather lovely, and what a view, and so on. Outwardly this
encounter was completely meaningless. But, seen from within, it
was so weighty that it not only occupied my thoughts for days but
has remained forever in my memory, like a shrine by the wayside.
At that time I was still in that childlike state where life consists of
single, unrelated experiences. For who could discover the threads
of fate which led from Brother Klaus to the pretty girl?

This period of my life was filled with conflicting thoughts.
Schopenhauer and Christianity would not square with one another,
for one thing; and for another, No. 1 wanted to free himself from the
pressure or melancholy of No. 2. It was not No. 2 who was
depressed, but No. 1 when he remembered No. 2. It was just at this
time that, out of the clash of opposites, the first systematic fantasy
of my life was born. It made its appearance piece by piece, and it
had its origin, so far as I can remember, in an experience which

stirred me profoundly.

One day a 'northwest wind was lashing the Rhine into foaming
waves. My way to school led along the river. Suddenly I saw
approaching from the north a ship with a great mainsail running up
the Rhine before the storm. Here was something completely new in
my experience-a sailing vessel on the Rhine! My imagination took
wings. If, instead of this swiftly flowing river, all of Alsace were a
lake, we would have sailing boats and great steamers. Then Basel
would be a port; it would be almost as good as living by the sea.
Then everything would be different, and we would live in another
time and another world. There would be no Gymnasium, no long
walk to school, and I would be grown up and able to arrange my life
as I wished. There would be a hill of rock rising out of the lake,
connected by a narrow isthmus to the mainland, cut through by a
broad canal with a wooden bridge over it, leading to a gate flanked
by towers and opening into a little medieval city built on the
surrounding slopes. On the rock stood a well-fortified castle with a
tall keep, a watchtower. This was my house. In it there were no fine
halls or any signs of magnificence. The rooms were simple,
paneled, and rather small. There was an uncommonly attractive
library where you could find everything worth knowing. There was
also a collection of weapons, and the bastions were mounted with
heavy cannon. Besides that, there was a garrison of fifty men-at-
arms in the castle. The little town had several hundred inhabitants
and was governed by a mayor and a town council of old men. I
myself was justice of the peace, arbitrator, and adviser, who
appeared only now and then to hold court. On the landward side the
town had a port in which lay my two masted schooner, armed with
several small cannon.

The nerve center and raison d'etre of this whole arrangement was
the secret of the keep, which I alone knew. The thought had come to
me like a shock. For, inside the tower, extending from the

battlements to the vaulted cellar, was a copper column or heavy
wire cable as thick as a man's arm, which ramified at the top into
the finest branches, like the crown of a tree or-better still-like a
taproot with all its tiny rootlets turned upside down and reaching into
the air. From the air they drew a certain inconceivable something
which was conducted down the copper column into the cellar. Here I
had an equally inconceivable apparatus, a kind of laboratory in
which I made gold out of the mysterious substance which the
copper roots drew from the air. This was really an arcanum, of
whose nature I neither had nor wished to form any conception. Nor
did my Imagination concern itself with the nature of the
transformation process. Tactfully and with a certain nervousness it
skirted around what actually went on in this laboratory. There was a
kind of inner prohibition: one was not supposed to look into it too
closely, nor ask what kind of substance was extracted from the air.
As Goethe says of the Mothers, "Even to speak of them dismays
the bold."

"Spirit," of course, meant for me something ineffable, but at bottom I
did not regard it as essentially different from very rarefied air. What
the roots absorbed and transmitted to the copper trunk was a kind
of spiritual essence which became visible down in the cellar as
finished gold coins. This was certainly no mere conjuring trick, but a
venerable and vitally important secret of nature which had come to
me I know not how and which I had to conceal not only from the
council of elders but, in a sense, also from myself.

My long, boring walk to and from school began to shorten most
delightfully. Scarcely was I out of the schoolhouse than I was already
in the castle, where structural alterations were in progress, council
sessions were being held, evildoers sentenced, disputes
arbitrated, cannon fired. The schooner's decks were cleared, the
sails rigged, and the vessel steered carefully out of the harbor

before a gentle breeze, and then, as it emerged from behind the
rock, tacked into a stiff nor'wester. Suddenly I found myself on my
doorstep, as though only a few minutes had passed. I stepped out
of my fantasy as out of a carriage which had effortlessly driven me
home. This highly enjoyable occupation lasted for several months
before I got sick of it. Then I found the fantasy silly and ridiculous.
Instead of daydreaming I began building castles and artfully fortified
emplacements out of small stones, using mud as mortar-the
fortress of Huningen, which at that time was still intact, serving me
as a model. I studied all the available fortification plans of Vauban,
and was soon familiar with all the technicalities. From Vauban I
turned to modern methods of fortification, and tried with my limited
means to build models of all the different types. This preoccupied
me in my leisure hours for more than two years, during which time
my leanings toward nature study and concrete things steadily
increased, at the cost of No. 2.

As long as I knew so little about real things, there was no point, I
thought, in thinking about them. Anyone could have fantasies, but
real knowledge was another matter. My parents

7 Faust, Part Two, p. 76. 1

allowed me to take out a subscription for a scientific periodical,
which I read with passionate interest. I hunted and collected all the
fossils to be found in our Jura mountains, and all the obtainable
minerals, also insects and the bones of mammoths and men-
mammoth bones from gravel pits in the Rhineland plain, human
bones from a mass grave near Huningen, dating from 1811. Plants
interested me too, but not in a scientific sense. I was attracted to
them for a reason I could not understand, and with a strong feeling
that they ought not to be pulled up and dried. They were living
beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and
flowering-a hidden, secret meaning, one of God's thoughts. They

were to be regarded with awe and contemplated with philosophical
wonderment. What the biologist had to say about them was
interesting, but it was not the essential thing. Yet I could not explain
to myself what this essential thing was. How were plants related to
the Christian religion or to the negation of the Will, for example?
This was something I could not fathom. They obviously partook of
the divine state of innocence which it was better not to disturb. By
way of contrast, insects were denatured plants-flowers and fruits
which had presumed to crawl about on legs or stilts and to fly
around with wings like the petals of blossoms, and busied
themselves preying on plants. Because of this unlawful activity they
were condemned to mass executions, June bugs and caterpillars
being the especial targets of such punitive expeditions. My
"sympathy with all creatures was strictly limited to warm-blooded
animals. The only exceptions among the cold-blooded vertebrates
were frogs and toads, because of their resemblance to human
beings.

Student Years

IN spite of my growing scientific interests, I turned back from time to
time to my philosophical books. The question of my choice of a
profession was drawing alarmingly close. I looked forward with
longing to the end of my school days. Then ' I would go to the
university and study-natural science, of course. Then I would know
something real. But no sooner had I made myself this premise than
my doubts began. Was not my bent rather toward history and
philosophy? Then again, I was intensely interested in everything
Egyptian and Babylonian, and would have liked best to be an
archaeologist. But I had no money to study anywhere except in
Basel, and in Basel there was no teacher for this subject. So this
plan very soon came to an end . For a long ti me I could not make up
my mind and constantly postponed the decision. My father was very
worried. He said once, "The boy is interested in everything
imaginable, but he does not know what he wants." I could only admit
that he was right. As matriculation approached and we had to
decide what faculty to register for, I abruptly decided on science,
but I left my schoolfellows in doubt as to whether I intended to go in
definitely for science or the humanities.

This apparently sudden decision had a background of its own.
Some weeks previously, just at the time when No. 1 and No. 2.
were wrestling for a decision, I had two dreams. In the first dream I
was in a dark wood that stretched along the Rhine. I came to a little
hill, a burial mound, and began to dig. After a while I turned up, to
my astonishment, some bones of prehistoric animals. This

interested me enormously, and at that moment I knew: I must get to
know nature, the world in which we live, and the things around us.

Then came a second dream. Again I was in a wood; it was
threaded with watercourses, and in the darkest place I saw a
circular pool, surrounded by dense undergrowth. Half immersed in
the water lay the strangest and most wonderful creature: a round
animal, shimmering in opalescent hues, and consisting of
innumerable little cells, or of organs shaped like tentacles. It was a
giant radiolarian, measuring about three feet across. It seemed to
me indescribably wonderful that this magnificent creature should be
lying there undisturbed, in the hidden place, in the clear, deep
water. It aroused in me an intense desire for knowledge, so that I
awoke with a beating heart. These two dreams decided me
overwhelmingly in favor of science, and removed all my doubts.

It became clear to me that I was living in a time and a place where a
person had to earn his living. To do so, one had to be this or that,
and it made a deep impression on me that all my schoolfellows
were imbued with this necessity and thought about nothing else. I
felt I was in some way odd. Why could I not make up my mind and
commit myself to something definite? Even that plodding fellow D.
who had been held up to me by my German teacher as a model of
diligence and conscientiousness was certain that he would study
theology. I saw that I would have to settle down and think the matter
through. If I took up zoology, for instance, I could be only a
schoolmaster, or at best an employee in a zoological garden. There
was no future in that, even if one's demands were modest-though I
would certainly have preferred working in a zoo to the life of a
school-teacher.

In this blind alley the inspiration suddenly came to me that I could
study medicine. Strangely enough, this had never occurred to me
before, although my paternal grandfather, of whom I had heard so

much, had been a doctor. Indeed, for that very reason I had a
certain resistance to this profession. "Only don't imitate," was my
motto. But now I told myself that the study of medicine at least
began with scientific subjects. To that extent I would be doing what I
wanted. Moreover, the field of medicine was so broad that there
was always the possibility of specializing later. I had definitely opted
for science, and the only question was: How? I had to earn my
living, and as I had no money I could not attend a university abroad
and obtain the kind of training that would give me hopes of a
scientific career. At best I could become only a dilettante in
science. Nor, since I possessed a personality that made me
disliked by many of my schoolfellows and of the people who
counted (i.e., the teachers), was there any hope of finding a patron
who would support my wish. When, therefore, I finally decided on
medicine, it was with the rather disagreeable feeling that it was not
a good thing to start life with such a compromise. Nevertheless, I
felt considerably relieved now that this irrevocable decision had
been made.

The painful question then presented itself: Where was the money to
come from? My father could raise only part of it. He applied to the
University of Basel for a stipend for me, and to my shame it was
granted. I was ashamed, not so much because our poverty was laid
bare for all the world to see, but because I had secretly been
convinced that all the "top" people, the people who "counted," were
ill disposed toward me. I had never expected any such kindness
from them. I had obviously profited by the reputation of my father,
who was a good and uncomplicated person. Yet I felt myself totally
different from him. I had, infact, two different conceptions of myself.
Through No. 1's eyes I saw myself as a rather disagreeable and
moderately gifted young man with vaulting ambitions, an
undisciplined temperament, and dubious manners, alternating
between naive enthusiasm and fits of childish disappointment, in

his innnermost essence a hermit and obscurantist. On the other
hand, No. 2 regarded No. 1 as a diflicult and thankless moral task,
a lesson that had to be got through somehow, complicated by a
variety of faults such as spells of laziness, despondency,
depression, inept enthusiasm for ideas and things that nobody
valued, liable to imaginary friendships, limited, prejudiced, stupid
(mathematics!), with a lack of understanding for other people,
vague and confused in philosophical matters, neither an honest
Christian nor anything else. No. 2 had no definable character at all;
he was a vita peracta, born, living, dead, everything in one; a total
vision of life. Though pitilessly clear about himself, he was unable to
express himself through the dense, dark medium of No. 1, though
he longed to do so. When No. 2 predominated, No. 1 was
contained and obliterated in him, just as, conversely, No. 1
regarded No. 2 as a region of inner darkness. No. 2 felt that any
conceivable expression of himself would be like a stone thrown
over the edge of the world, dropping soundlessly into infinite night.
But in him (No. 2) light reigned, as in the spacious halls of a royal
palace whose high easements open upon a landscape flooded with
sunlight. Here were meaning and historical continuity, in strong
contrast to the incoherent fortuitousness of No. 1's life, which had no
real points of contact with its environment. No. 2, on the other hand,
felt himself in secret accord with the Middle Ages, as personified by
Faust, with the legacy of a past which had obviously stirred Goethe
to the depths. For Goethe too, therefore-and this was my great
consolation-No. 2 was a reality. Faust, as I now realized with
something of a shock, meant more to me than my beloved Gospel
according to St. John. There was something in Faust that worked
directly on my feelings. John's Christ was strange to me, but still
stranger was the Savior of the other gospels. Faust, on the other
hand, was the living equivalent of No. 2, and I was convinced that he
was the answer which Goethe had given to his times. This insight
was not only comforting to, me, it also gave me an increased

feeling of inner security and a sense of belonging to the human
community. I was no longer isolated and a mere curiosity, a sport of
cruel nature. My godfather and authority was the great Goethe
himself.

About this time I had a dream which both frightened and
encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was
making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog
was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny
light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything
depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the
feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back,
and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same
moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my
little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers.
When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a "specter of the
Bracken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being
by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my
consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the
sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small
and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a
light, my only light.

This dream was a great illumination for me. Now I knew that No. 1
was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2 followed him like a
shadow. My task was to shield the light and not look back at the vita
peracta; this was evidently a forbidden realm of light of a different
sort. I must go forward against the storm, which sought to thrust me
back into the immeasurable darkness of a world where one is
aware of nothing except the surfaces of things in the background. In
the role of No. 1, I had to go forward-into study, moneymaking,
responsibilities, entanglements, confusions, errors, submissions,
defeats. The storm pushing against me was time, ceaselessly
flowing into the past, which just as ceaselessly dogs our heels. It

exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into
itself; we can only escape from it— for a while-by.pressing forward.
The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who
cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer.

My view of the world spun around another ninety degrees; I
recognized clearly that my path led irrevocably outward, into the
limitations and darkness of three-dimensionality. It seemed to me
that Adam must once have left Paradise in this manner; Eden had
become a specter for him, and light was where a stony field had to
be tilled in the sweat of his brow.

I asked myself: "Whence comes such a dream?" Till then I had
taken it for granted that such dreams were sent directly by God. But
now I had imbibed so much epistemology that doubts assailed me.
One might say, for instance, that my insight had been slowly
ripening for a long time and had then suddenly broken through in a
dream. And that, indeed, is what had happened. But this
explanation is merely a description. The real question was why this
process took place and why it broke through into consciousness.
Consciously I had done nothing to promote any such development;
on the contrary, my sympathies were on the other side. Something
must therefore have been at work behind the scenes, some
intelligence, at any rate something more intelligent than myself. For
the extraordinary idea that in the light of consciousness the inner
realm of light appears as a gigantic shadow was not something I
would have hit on of my own accord. Now all at once I understood
many things that had been inexplicable to me before-in particular
that cold shadow of embarrassment and estrangement which
passed over people's faces whenever I alluded to anything
reminiscent of the inner realm.

I must leave No. 2 behind me, that was clear. But under no
circumstances ought I to deny him to myself or declare him invalid.

That would have been a self-mutilation, and would moreover have
deprived me of any possibility of explaining the origin of the
dreams. For there was no doubt in my mind that No. 2 had
something to do with the creation of dreams, and I could easily
credit him with the necessary superior intelligence. But I felt myself
to be increasingly identical with No. 1 , and this state proved in turn
to be merely a part of the far more comprehensive No. 2, with whom
for that very reason I could no longer feel myself identical. He was
indeed a specter, a spirit who could hold his own against the world
of darkness. This was something I had not known before the dream,
and even at the time-l am sure of this in retrospect-l was
conscious of it only vaguely, although I knew it emotionally beyond a
doubt.

At any rate, a schism had taken place between me and No. 2, with
the result that "I" was assigned to No. 1 and was separated from
No. 2. in the same degree, who thereby acquired, as it were, an
autonomous personality. I did not connect this with the idea of any
definite individuality, such as a revenant might have, although with
my rustic origins this possibility would not have seemed strange to
me. In the country people believe in these things according to the
circumstances: they are and they are not. The only distinct feature
about this spirit was his historical character, his extension in time,
or rather, his timelessness. Of course I did not tell myself this in so
many words, nor did I form any conception of his spatial existence.
He played the role of a factor in the background of my No. 1
existence, never clearly defined but yet definitely present.

Children react much less to what grown-ups say than to the
imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere. The child
unconsciously adapts himself to them, this produces in him
correlations of a compensatory nature. The peculiar "religious"
ideas that came to me even in my earliest childhood were
spontaneous products which can be understood only as reactions

to my parental enviromnent and to the spirit of the age. The
religious doubts to which my father was later to succumb naturally
had to pass through a long period of incubation. Such a revolution
of one's world, and of the world in general, threw its shadows
ahead, and the shadows were all the longer, the more desperately
my father's conscious mind resisted their power. It is not surprising
that my father's forebodings put him in a state of unrest, which then
communicated itself to me.

I never had the impression that these influences emanated from my
mother, for she was somehow rooted in deep, invisible ground,
though it never appeared to me as confidence in her Christian faith.
For me it was somehow connected with animals, trees, mountains,
meadows, and running water, all of which contrasted most strangely
with her Christian surface and her conventional assertions of faith.
This background corresponded so well to my own attitude that it
caused me no uneasiness; on the contrary, it gave me a sense of
security and the conviction that here was solid ground on which one
could stand. It never occurred to me how "pagan" this foundation
was. My mother's "No. 2" offered me the strongest support in the
conflict then beginning between paternal tradition and the strange,
compensatory products which my unconscious had been stimulated
to create.

Looking back, I now see how very much my development as a child
anticipated future events and paved the way for modes of
adaptation to my father's religious collapse as well as to the
shattering revelation of the world as we see it today-a revelation
which had not taken shape from one day to the next, but had cast its
shadows long in advance. Although we human beings have our own
personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the
victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are
counted in centuries. We can well think all our lives long that we are
following our own noses, and mav never discover that we are, for

the most part, supernumeraries on the stage of the world theater.
There are factors which, although we do not know them,
nevertheless influence our lives, the more so if they are
unconscious. Thus at least a part of our being lives in the centuries-
that part which, for my private use, I have designated "No. 2." That it
is not an individual curiosity is proved by the religion of the West,
which expressly applies itself to this inner man and for two thousand
years has earnestly tried to bring him to the knowledge of our
surface consciousness with its personalistic preoccupations: "Non
foras ire, in interiore homine habitat Veritas" (Go not outside; truth
dwells in the inner man).

During the years 1892-94 I had a number of rather vehement
discussions with my father. He had studied Oriental languages in
Gottingen and had done his dissertation on the Arabic version of
the Song of Songs. His days of glory had ended with his final
examination. Thereafter he forgot his linguistic talent. As a country
parson he lapsed into a sort of sentimental idealism and into
reminiscences of his golden student days, continued to smoke a
long student's pipe, and discovered that his marriage was not all he
had imagined it to be. He did a great deal of good-far too much-
and as a result was usually irritable. Both parents made great
efforts to live devout lives, with the result that there were angry
scenes between them only too frequently. These difficulties,
understandably enough, later shattered my father's faith.

At that time his irritability and discontent had increased, and his
condition filled me with concern. My mother avoided everything that
might excite him and refused to engage in disputes. Though I
realized that this was the wisest course to take, often I could not
keep my own temper in check. I would remain passive during his
outbursts of rage, but when he seemed to be in a more accessible
mood I sometimes tried to strike up a conversation with him, hoping

to learn something about his inner thoughts and his understanding
of himself. It was clear to me that something quite specific was
tormenting him, and I suspected that it had to do with his faith. From
a number of hints he let fall I was convinced that he suffered from
religious doubts. This, it seemed to me, was bound to be the case if
the necessary experience had not come to him. From my attempts
at discussion I learned in fact that something of the sort was amiss,
for all my questions were met with the same old lifeless theological
answers, or with a resigned shrug which aroused the spirit of
contradiction in me. I could not understand why he did not seize on
these opportunities pugnaciously and come to terms with his
situation. I saw that my critical questions made him sad, but I
nevertheless hoped for a constructive talk, since it appeared almost
inconceivable to me that he should not have had experience of
God, the most evident of all experiences. I knew enough about
epistemology to realize that knowledge of this sort could not be
proved, but it was equally clear to me that it stood in no more need
of proof than the beauty of a sunset or the terrors of the night. I tried,
no doubt very clumsily, to convey these obvious truths to him, with
the hopeful intention of helping him to bear the fate which had
inevitably befallen him. He had to quarrel with somebody, so he did
it with his family and himself. Why didn't he do it with God, the dark
author of all created things, who alone was responsible for the
sufferings of the world? God would assuredly have sent him byway
of an answer one of those magical, infinitely profound dreams which
He had sent to me even without being asked, and which had sealed
my fate. I did not know why, it simply was so. Yes, He had even
allowed me a glimpse into His own being. This was a great secret
which I dared not and could not reveal to my father. I might have
been able to reveal it had he been capable of understanding the
direct experience of God. But in my talks with him I never got that
far, never even came within sight of the problem, because I always
set about it in a very unpsychological and intellectual way, and did

everything possible to avoid the emotional aspects. Each time this
approach was like a red rag to a bull and led to irritable reactions
which were incomprehensible to me. I was unable to understand
how a perfectly rational argument could meet with such emotional
resistance.

These fruitless discussions exasperated my father and me, and in
the end we abandoned them, each burdened with his own specific
feeling of inferiority. Theology had alienated my father and me from
one another. I felt that I had once again suffered a fatal defeat,
though I sensed I was not alone. I had a dim premonition that he
was inescapably succumbing to his fate. He was lonely and had no
friend to talk with. At least I knew no one among our acquaintances
whom I would have trusted to say the saving word. Once I heard him
praying. He struggled desperately to keep his faith. I was shaken
and outraged at once, because I saw how hopelessly he was
entrapped by the Church and its theological thinking. They had
blocked all avenues by which he might have reached God directly,
and then faithlessly abandoned him. Now I understood the deepest
meaning of my earlier experience: God Himself had disavowed
theology and the Church founded upon it. On the other hand God
condoned this theology, as He condoned so much else. It seemed
ridiculous to me to suppose that men were responsible for such
developments. What were men, anyway? "They are born dumb and
blind as puppies," I thought, "and like all God's creatures are
furnished with the dimmest light, never enough to illuminate the
darkness in which they grope." I was equally sure that none of the
theologians I knew had ever seen "the light that shineth in the
darkness" with his own eyes, for if they had they would not have
been able to teach a "theological religion," which seemed quite
inadequate to me, since there was nothing to do with it but believe it
without hope. This was what my father had tried valiantly to do, and
had run aground. He could not even defend himself against the

ridiculous materialism of the psychiatrists. This, too, was something
that one had to believe, just like theology, only in the opposite
sense. I felt more certain than ever that both of them lacked
epistemological criticism as well as experience.

My father was obviously under the impression that psychiatrists had
discovered something in the brain which proved that in the place
where mind should have been there was only matter, and nothing
"spiritual." This was borne out by his admonitions that if I studied
medicine I should in Heaven's name not become a materialist. To
me this warning meant that I ought to believe nothing at all, for I
knew that materialists believed in their definitions just as the
theologians did in theirs, and that my poor father had simply jumped
out of the frying pan into the fire. I recognized that this celebrated
faith of his had played this deadly trick on him, and not only on him
but on most of the cultivated and serious people I knew. The arch
sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience. How
did the theologians know that God had deliberately arranged
certain things and "permitted" certain others, and how did the
psychiatrists know that matter was endowed with the qualities of the
human mind? 1 was in no danger of succumbing to materialism, but
my father certainly was. Apparently someone had whispered
something about "suggestion," for I discovered that he was reading
Bernheim's book on suggestion in Sigmund Freud's translation^ ]
This was a new and significant departure, for I had never before
seen my father reading anything but novels or an occasional travel
book. All "clever" and interesting books were taboo. But his
psychiatric reading made him no happier. His depressive moods
increased in frequency and intensity, and so did his hypochondria.
For a number of years he had complained of all sorts of abdominal
symptoms, though his doctor had been unable to find anything
definite wrong with him. Now he complained of the sensation of
having "stones in

1 Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung (Leipzig and Vienna, 1888).

the abdomen." For a long time we did not take this seriously, but at
last the doctor became suspicious. This was toward the end of the
summer of 1895.

In the spring of that year I had begun my studies at the University of
Basel. The only time in my life that I have ever been bored-my
school days at the Gymnasium was over at last and the golden
gates to the universitas litterarum and to academic freedom were
opening wide for me. Now I would hear the truth about nature, at
least its most essential aspects. I would learn all there was to know
about the anatomy and physiology of man, and would acquire
knowledge of the diseases. In addition to all this, I was admitted
into a color-wearing fraternity to which my father had belonged.
Early in my freshman year he came along on a fraternity outing to a
wine-growing village in the Markgrafen country and there delivered
a whimsical speech in which, to my delight, the gay spirit of his own
student days came back again. I realized in a flash that his life had
come to a standstill at his graduation, and the verse of a student
song echoed in my ears:

Sie zogen mit gesenktem. Blick
In das Philisterland zuruck.
O jerum, jerum, jerum,
O quae mutatio rerum! "[2]

The words fell heavily on my soul. Once upon a time he too had
been an enthusiastic student in his first year, as I was now; the
world had opened out for him, as it was doing for me; the infinite
treasures of knowledge had spread before him, as now before me.
How can it have happened that everything was blighted for him, had
turned to sourness and bitterness? I found no answer, or too many.
The speech he delivered that summer evening over the wine was
the last chance he had to live out his memories of the time when he

was what he should have been. Soon afterward his condition
deteriorated. In the late autumn of 1895 he became bedridden, and
early in 1896 he died.

2 "With downcast eyes they marched back to the land of the Philistines. O
dear, Odear, Odear, how things ha\e changed"

I had come home after lectures, and asked how he was. "Oh, still
the same. He's very weak," my mother said. He whispered
something to her, which she repeated to me, warning me with her
eyes of his delirious condition: "He wants to know whether you have
passed the state examination? I saw that I must lie. "Yes, it went
very well." He sighed with relief, and closed his eyes. A little later I
went in to see him again. He was alone; my mother was doing
something in the adjoining room. There was a rattling in his throat,
and I could see that he was in the death agony. I stood by his bed,
fascinated. I had never seen anyone die before. Suddenly he
stopped breathing. I waited and waited for the next breath. It did not
come. Then I remembered my mother and went into the next room,
where she sat by the window, knitting. "He is dying," I said. She
came with me to the bed, and saw that he was dead. She said as if
in wonderment: "How quickly it has all passed."

The following days were gloomy and painful, and little of them has
remained in my memory. Once my mother spoke to me or to the
surrounding air in her "second" voice, and remarked, "He died in
time for you." Which appeared to mean: "You did not understand
each other and he might have become a hindrance to you." This
view seemed to me to fit in with my mother's No. 2 personality.

The words "for you" hit me terribly hard, and I felt that a bit of the old
days had now come irrevocably to an end. At the same time, a bit
of manliness and freedom awoke in me. After my father's death I
moved into his room, and took his place inside the family. For

instance, I had to hand out the housekeeping money to my mother
every week, because she was unable to economize and could not
manage money.

Six weeks after his death my father appeared to me in a dream.
Suddenly he stood before me and said that he was coming back
from his holiday. He had made a good recovery and was now
coming home. I thought he would be annoyed with me for having
moved into his room. But not a bit of it! Nevertheless, I felt ashamed
because I had imagined he was dead. Two days later the dream
was repeated. My father had recovered and was coming home, and
again I reproached myself because I had thought he was dead.
Later I kept asking myself: "What does it mean that my father
returns in dreams and that he seems so real?" It was an
unforgettable experience, and it forced me for the first time to think
about life after death. With the death of my father difficult problems
arose concerning the continuation of my studies. Some of my
mother's relations took the view that I ought to look for a clerk's job
in a business house, so as to earn money as quickly as possible.
My mother's youngest brother offered to help her, since her
resources were not nearly sufficient to live on. An uncle on my
father's side helped me. At the end of my studies I owed him three
thousand francs. The rest I earned by working as a junior assistant
and by helping an aged aunt dispose of her small collection of
antiques. I sold them piece by piece at good prices, and received a
very welcome percentage.

I would not have missed this time of poverty. One learns to value
simple things. I still remember the time when I was given a box of
cigars as a present. It seemed to me princely. They lasted a whole
year, for I allowed myself one only on Sundays. My student days
were a good time for me. Everything was intellectually alive, and it
was also a time of friendships. In the fraternity meetings I gave
several lectures on theological and psychological subjects. We had

many animated discussions, and not always about medical
questions only. We argued over Schopenhauer and Kant, we knew
all about the stylistic niceties of Cicero, and were interested in
theology and philosophy.

During my student days I received much stimulation in regard to
religious questions. At home I had the welcome opportunity to talk
with a theologian who had been my father's vicar. He was
distinguished not only by his phenomenal appetite, which put mine
quite in the shade, but by his remarkable erudition. From him I
learned a great deal about the Church Fathers and the history of
dogma. He also introduced me to new aspects of Protestant
theology. Ritschl's theology was much in fashion in those days. Its
historicism irritated me, especially the comparison with a railway
train. The theological students with whom I had discussions in the
fraternity all seemed quite

3Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) compared Christ's coming to the shunting of a
railroad train. The engine gives a push from behind, the motion passes
through the entire train, and the foremost car begins to move. Thus the
impulse given by Christ is transmitted down the centuries. -A. J.

content with the theory of the historical effect produced by Christ's
life. This view seemed to me not only soft-witted but altogether
lifeless. Neither could I subscribe to the tendency to move Christ
into the foreground and make him the sole decisive figure in the
drama of God and man. To me this absolutely belied Christ's own
view that the Holy Ghost, who had begotten him, would take his
place among men after his death.

For me the Holy Ghost was a manifestation of the inconceivable
God. The workings of the Holy Ghost were not only sublime but also
partook of that strange and even questionable quality which
characterized the deeds of Yahweh, whom I naively identified with

the Christian image of God, as I had been taught in my instruction
for confirmation. (I was also not aware at this time that the devil,
properly speaking, had been born with Christianity.) Lord Jesus
was to me unquestionably a man and therefore a fallible figure, or
else a mere mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost. This highly unorthodox
view, a far cry from the theological one, naturally ran up against utter
incomprehension. The disappointment I felt about this gradually led
me to a kind of resigned indifference, and confirmed my conviction
that in religious matters only experience counted.

During my first years at the university I made the discovery that
while science opened the door to enormous quantities of
knowledge, it provided genuine insights very sparingly, and these in
the main were of a specialized nature. I knew from my philosophical
reading that the existence of the psyche was responsible for this
situation. Without the psyche there would be neither knowledge nor
insight. Yet nothing was ever said about the psyche. Everywhere it
was tacitly taken for granted, and even when someone mentioned
it-as did C. G. Cams, for example-there was no real knowledge of
it but only philosophical speculation which might just as easily take
one turn as another. I could make neither head nor tail of this
curious observation.

At the end of my second semester, however, I made another
discovery, which was to have great consequences. In the library of a
classmate's father I came upon a small book on spiritualistic
phenomena, dating from the seventies. It was an account of
beginnings of spiritualism, and was written by a theologian. My
initial doubts were quickly dissipated, for I could not help seeing
that the phenomena described in the book were in principle much
the same as the stories I had heard again and again in the country
since my earliest childhood. The material, without a doubt, was
authentic. But the great question of whether these stories were
physically true was not answered to my satisfaction. Nevertheless, it

could be established that at all times and all over the world the
same stories had been reported again and again. There must be
some reason for this, and it could not possibly have been the
predominance of the same religious conceptions everywhere, for
that was obviously not the case. Rather it must be connected with
the objective behavior of the human psyche. But with regard to this
cardinal question-the objective nature of the psyche-l could find
out absolutely nothing, except what the philosophers said.

The observations of the spiritualists, weird and questionable as
they seemed to me, were the first accounts I had seen of objective
psychic phenomena. Names like Zoellner and Crookes impressed
themselves on me, and I read virtually the whole of the literature
available to me at the time. Naturally I also spoke of these matters
to my comrades, who to my great astonishment reacted with
derision and disbelief or with anxious defensiveness. I wondered at
the sureness with which they could assert that things like ghosts and
table-turning were impossible and therefore fraudulent, and on the
other hand at the evidently anxious nature of their defensiveness. I,
too, was not certain of the absolute reliability of the reports, but why,
after all, should there not be ghosts? How did we know that
something was "impossible"? And, above all, what did the anxiety
signify? For myself I found such possibilities extremely interesting
and attractive. They added another dimension to my life; the world
gained depth and background. Could, for example, dreams have
anything to do with ghosts? Kant's Dreams of a Spirit Seer came
just at the right moment, and soon I also discovered Karl Duprel,
who had evaluated these ideas philosophically and psychologically.
I dug up Eschenmayer, Passavant, Justinus Kerner, and Gorres,
and read seven volumes of Swedenborg.

My mother's No. 2 sympathized wholeheartedly with my enthusiasm,
but everyone else I knew was distinctly discouraging. Hitherto I had

encountered only the brick wall of traditional views, but now I came
up against the steel of people's prejudice and their utter incapacity
to admit unconventional possibilities. I found this even with my
closest friends. To them all this was far worse than my
preoccupation with theology. I had the feeling that I had pushed to
the brink of the world; what was of burning interest to me was null
and void for others, I and even a cause for dread.

Dread of what? I could find no explanation for this. After all, there
was nothing preposterous or world-shaking in the idea that there
might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space,
time, and causality. Animals were known to sense beforehand
storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw the
death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of
death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. All these
things had been taken for granted in the world of my childhood. And
now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of them.
In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled
into. Plainly the urban world knew nothing about the country world,
the real world of mountains, woods, and rivers, of animals and
"God's thoughts" (plants and crystals). I found this explanation
comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem, for I realized
that for all its wealth of learning the urban world was mentally rather
limited. This insight proved dangerous, because it tricked me into
fits of superiority, misplaced criticism, and aggressiveness, which
got me deservedly disliked. This eventually brought back all the old
doubts, inferiority feelings, and depressions-a vicious circle I was
resolved to break at all costs. No longer would I stand outside the
world, enjoying the dubious reputation of a freak.

After my first introductory course I became junior assistant in
anatomy, and the following semester the demonstrator placed me
in charge of the course in histology-to my intense satisfaction,
naturally. I interested myself primarily in evolutionary theory and

comparative anatomy, and I also became acquainted with neo-
vitalistic doctrines. What fascinated me most of all was the
morphological point of view in the broadest sense. With physiology
it was just the opposite. I found the subject thoroughly repellent
because of vivisection, which was practiced merely for purposes of
demonstration. I could never free myself from the feeling that warm-
blooded creatures were akin to us and not just cerebral automata.
Consequently I cut demonstration classes whenever I could. I
realized that one had to experiment on animals, but the
demonstration of such experiments nevertheless seemed to me
horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary. I had imagination
enough to picture the demonstrated procedures from a mere
description of them. My compassion for animals did not derive from
the Buddhistic trimmings of Schopenhauer's philosophy, but rested
on the deeper foundation of a primitive attitude of mind-on an
unconscious identity with animals. At the time, of course, I was
wholly ignorant of this important psychological fact. My repugnance
for physiology was so great that my examination results in this
subject were correspondingly poor. Nevertheless, I scraped
through.

The clinical semesters that followed kept me so busy that scarcely
any time remained for my forays into outlying fields. I was able to
study Kant only on Sundays. I also read Eduard von Hartmann
assiduously. Nietzsche had been on my program for some time, but
I hesitated to begin reading him because I felt I was insufficiently
prepared. At that time he was much discussed, mostly in adverse
terms, by the allegedly competent philosophy students, from which I
was able to deduce the hostility he aroused in the higher echelons.
The supreme authority, of course, was Jakob Burckhardt, whose
various critical comments on Nietzsche were bandied about.
Moreover, there were some persons at the university who had
known Nietzsche personally and were able to retail all sorts of

unflattering tidbits about him. Most of them had not read a word of
Nietzsche and therefore dwelt at length on his outward foibles, for
example, his putting on airs as a gentleman, his manner of playing
the piano, his stylistic exaggerations-idiosyncrasies which got on
the nerves of the good people of Basel in those days. Such things
would certainly not have caused me to postpone the reading of
Nietzsche-on the contrary, they acted as the strongest incentive.
But I was held back by a secret fear that I might perhaps be like
him, at least in regard to the "secret" which had isolated him from
his environment. Perhaps-who knows?-he had had inner
experiences, insights which he had unfortunately attempted to talk
about, and had found that no one understood him. Obviously he
was, or at least was considered to be, an eccentric, a sport of
nature, which I did not want to be under any circumstances. I feared
I might be forced to recognize that I too was another such strange
bird. Of course, he was a professor, had written whole long books
and so had attained unimaginable heights, but, like me, he was a
clergyman's son. He, however, had been born in the great land of
Germany, which reached as far as the sea, while I was only a Swiss
and sprang from a modest parsonage in a small border village. He
spoke a polished High German, knew Latin and Greek, possibly
French, Italian, and Spanish as well, whereas the only language I
commanded with any certainty was the Waggis-Basel dialect. He,
possessed of all these splendors, could well afford to be something
of an eccentric, but I must not let myself find out how far I might be
like him.

In spite of these trepidations I was curious, and finally resolved to
read him. Thoughts Out of Season was the first volume that fell into
my hands. I was carried away by enthusiasm, and soon afterward
read Thus Spake Zarathustra. This, like Goethe's Faust, was a
tremendous experience for me. Zarathustra was Nietzsche's Faust,
his No. 2, and my No. 2 now corresponded to Zarathustra-though

this was rather like comparing a molehill with Mount Blanc. And
Zarathustra-there could be no doubt about that-was morbid. Was
my No. 2 also morbid? This possibility filled me with a terror which
for a long time I refused to admit, but the idea cropped up again
and again at inopportune moments, throwing me into a cold sweat,
so that in the end I was forced to reflect on myself. Nietzsche had
discovered his No. 2 only late in life, when he was already past
middle age, whereas I had known mine ever since boyhood.
Nietzsche had spoken naively and incautiously about this arrheton,
this thing not to be named, as though it were quite in order. But I
had noticed in time that this only leads to trouble. He was so brilliant
that he was able to come to Basel as a professor when still a young
man, not suspecting what lay ahead of him. Because of his very
brilliance he should have noticed in time that something was amiss.
That, I thought, was his morbid misunderstanding: that he fearlessly
and unsuspectingly let his No. 2 loose upon a world that knew and
understood nothing about such things. He was moved by the
childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his
ecstasies and could grasp his "transvaluation of all values." But he
found only educated Philistines-tragi-comically, he was one
himself. Like the rest of them, he did not understand himself when
he fell head first into the unutterable mystery and wanted to sing its
praises to the dull, godforsaken masses. That was the reason for
the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the hymnlike
raptures-all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had
sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.-And he fell-
tightrope-walker that he proclaimed himself to be-into depths far
beyond himself. He did not know his way about in this world and
was like a man possessed, one who could be handled only with the
utmost caution. Among my friends and acquaintances I knew of only
two who openly declared themselves adherents of Nietzsche. Both
were homosexual; one of them ended by committing suicide, the
other ran to seed as a misunderstood genius. The rest of my friends

were not so much dumfounded by the phenomenon of Zarathustra
as simply immune to its appeal.

Just as Faust had opened a door for me, Zarathustra slammed one
shut, and it remained shut for a long time to come. I felt like the old
peasant who discovered that two of his cows had evidently been
bewitched and had got their heads in the same halter. "How did that
happen?" asked his small son. "Boy, one doesn't talk about such
things," replied his father.

I realized that one gets nowhere unless one talks to people about
the things they know. The naive person does not appreciate what
an insult it is to talk to one's fellows about anything that is unknown
to them. They pardon such ruthless behavior only in a writer,
journalist, or poet. I came to see that a new idea, or even just an
unusual aspect of an old one, can be communicated only by facts.
Facts remain and cannot be brushed aside; sooner or later
someone will come upon them and know what he has found. I
realized that I talked only for want of something better, that I ought to
be offering facts, and these I lacked entirely. I had nothing concrete
in my hands. More than ever I found myself driven toward
empiricism. I began to blame the philosophers for rattling away
when experience was lacking, and holding their tongues when they
ought to have been answering with facts. In this respect they all
seemed like watered-down theologians. I felt that at some time or
other I had passed through the valley of diamonds, but I could
convince no one-not even myself, when I looked at them more
closely-that the specimens I had brought back were not mere
pieces of gravel.

This was in 1898, when I began to think more seriously about my
career as a medical man. I soon came to the conclusion that I would
have to specialize. The choice seemed to lie between surgery and
internal medicine. I inclined toward the former because of my

special training in anatomy and my preference for pathology, and
would very probably have made surgery my profession if I had
possessed the necessary financial means. All along, it had been
extremely painful to me to have to go into debt in order to study at
all. I knew that after the final examination I would have to begin
earning my living as soon as possible. I imagined a career as
assistant at some cantonal hospital, where there was more hope of
obtaining a paid position than in a clinic. Moreover, a post in a
clinic depended to a large extent on the backing or personal
interest of the chief. With my questionable popularity and
estrangement from others-experienced all too often-l dared not
think of any such stroke of luck, and therefore contented myself with
the modest prospect of a post in one of the local hospitals. The rest
depended on hard work and on my capability and application.

During the summer holidays, however, something happened that
was destined to influence me profoundly. One day I was sitting in
my room, studying my textbooks. In the adjoining room, the door to
which stood ajar, my mother was knitting. That was our dining room,
where the round walnut dining table stood. The table had come from
the dowry of my paternal grandmother, and was at this time about
seventy years old. My mother was sitting by the window, about a
yard away from the table. My sister was at school and our maid in
the kitchen. Suddenly there sounded a report like a pistol shot. I
jumped up and rushed into the room from which the noise of the
explosion had come. My mother was sitting flabbergasted in her
armchair, the knitting fallen from her hands. She stammered out,
"W-w-what's happened? It was right beside mel" and stared at the
table. Following her eyes, I saw what had happened. The table top
had split from the rim to beyond the center, and not along any joint;
the split ran right through the solid wood. I was thunderstruck. How
could such a thing happen? A table of solid walnut that had dried
out for seventy years-how could it split on a summer day in the

relatively high degree of humidity characteristic of our climate? If it
had stood next to a heated stove on a cold, dry winter day, then it
might have been conceivable.

What in the world could have caused such an explosion? "There
certainly are curious accidents," I thought. My mother nodded
darkly. "Yes, yes," she said in her No. 2 voice, "that means
something." Against my will I was impressed and annoyed with
myself for not finding anything to say.

Some two weeks later I came home at six o'clock in the evening
and found the household-my mother, my fourteen-year-old sister,
and the maid-in a great state of agitation. About an hour earlier
there had been another deafening report. This time it was not the
already damaged table; the noise had come from the direction of
the sideboard, a heavy piece of furniture dating from the early
nineteenth century. They had already looked all over it, but had
found no trace of a split. I immediately began examining the
sideboard and the entire surrounding area, but just as fruitlessly.
Then I began on the interior of the sideboard. In the cupboard
containing the bread basket I found a loaf of bread, and, beside it,
the bread knife. The greater part of the blade had snapped off in
several pieces. The handle lay in one corner of the rectangular
basket, and in each of the other corners lay a piece of the blade.
The knife had been used shortly before, at four-o'clock tea, and
afterward put away. Since then no one had gone to the sideboard.

The next day I took the shattered knife to one of the best cutlers in
the town. He examined the fractures with a magni- tying glass, and
shook his head. "This knife is perfectly sound," he said. "There is
no fault in the steel. Someone must have deliberately broken it
piece by piece. It could be done, for instance, by sticking the blade
into the crack of the drawer and - breaking off a piece at a time. Or
else it might have been dropped on stone from a great height. But

good steel can't explode. Someone has been pulling your leg." I
have carefully kept the pieces of the knife to this day. My mother
and my sister had been in the room when the sudden report made
them jump.

My mother's No. 2 looked at me meaningfully, but I could find
nothing to say. I was completely at a loss and could offer no
explanation of what had happened, and this was all the more
annoying as I had to admit that I was profoundly impressed. Why
and how had the table split and the knife shattered? The hypothesis
that it was just a coincidence went much too far. It seemed highly
improbable to me that the Rhine would flow backward just once, by
mere chance-and all other possible explanations were
automatically ruled out. So what was it?

A few weeks later I heard of certain relatives who had been
engaged for some time in table-turning, and also had a medium, a
young girl of fifteen and a half. The group had been thinking of
having me meet the medium, who produced somnambulistic states
and spiritualistic phenomena. When I heard this, I immediately
thought of the strange manifestations in our house, and I
conjectured that they might be somehow connected with this
medium. I therefore began attending the regular seances which my
relatives held every Saturday evening. We had results in the form of
communications and tapping noises from the walls and the table.
Movements of the table independently of the medium were
questionable, and I soon found out that limiting conditions imposed
on the experiment generally had an obstructive effect. I therefore
accepted the obvious autonomy of the tapping noises and turned
my attention to the content of the communications. I set forth the
results of these observations in my doctoral thesis. After about two
years of experimentation we all became rather weary of it. I caught
the medium trying to produce phenomena by trickery, and this
made me break off the experiments-very much to my regret, for I

had learned from this example how a No. 2 personality is formed,
how it enters into a child's consciousness and finally integrates it
into itself. She was one of these precociously matured
personalities, and she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six. I
saw her once again, when she was twenty-four, and received a
lasting impression of the independence and maturity of her
personality. After her death I learned from her family that during the
last months of her life her character disintegrated bit by bit, and that
ultimately she returned to the state of a two-year-old child, in which
condition she fell into her last sleep.

All in all, this was the one great experience which wiped out all my
earlier philosophy and made it possible for me to achieve a
psychological point of view. I had discovered some objective facts
about the human psyche. Yet the nature of the experience was such
that once again I was unable to speak of it. I knew no one to whom I
could have told the whole story. Once more I had to lay aside an
unfinished problem. It was not until two years later that my
dissertation appeared. [4]

At the medical clinic Friedrich von Muller had taken the place of old
Immermann. In Muller I encountered a mind that appealed to me. I
saw how a keen intelligence grasped the problem and formulated
questions which in themselves were half the solution. He, for his
part, seemed to see something in me, for toward the end of my
studies he proposed that I should go with him, as his assistant, to
Munich, where he had received an appointment. This invitation
almost persuaded me to devote myself to internal medicine. I might
have done so had not something happened in the meantime which
removed all my doubts Concerning my future career.

4 Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phanomene: eine
psychietrische Studie (1902); English trans.: "On the Psychology and
Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena," in Psychiatric Studies (CW 1).

Though I had attended psychiatric lectures and clinics, the current
instructor in psychiatry was not exactly stimulating, and when I
recalled the effects which the experience of asylums had had on my
father, this was not calculated to prepossess me in favor of
psychiatry. In preparing myself for the state examination, therefore,
the textbook on psychiatry was the last I attacked. I expected
nothing of it, and I still remember that as I opened the book by
Krafft-Ebing[5] the thought came to me: '"Well, now let's see what a
psychiatrist has to say for himself." The lectures and clinical
demonstrations had not made the slightest impression on me. I
could not remember a single one of the cases I had seen in the
clinic, but only my boredom and disgust.

I began with the preface, intending to find out how a psychiatrist
introduced his subject or, indeed, justified his reason for existing at
all. By way of excuse for this high and mighty attitude I must make it
clear that in the medical world at that time psychiatry was quite
generally held in contempt. No one really knew anything about it,
and there was no psychology which regarded man as a whole and
included his pathological variations in the total picture. The director
was locked up in the same institution with his patients, and the
institution was equally cut off, isolated on the outskirts of the city like
an ancient lazaret with its lepers. No one liked looking in that
direction. The doctors knew almost as little as the layman and
therefore shared his feelings. Mental disease was a hopeless and
fatal affair which cast its shadow over psychiatry as well. The
psychiatrist was a strange f gure in those days, as I was soon to
learn from personal experience.

Beginning with the preface, I read; "It is probably due to the
peculiarity of the subject and its incomplete state of development
that psychiatric textbooks are stamped with a more or less
subjective character." A few lines further on, the author called the

psychoses "diseases of the personality? My heart suddenly began
to pound. I had to stand up and draw a deep breath. My excitement
was intense, for it had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination,
that for me the only possible goal

5 Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 4th edn. (1890).

was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could
flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was
the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I
had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the
place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

My violent reaction set in when Krafft-Ebing spoke of the
"subjective character" of psychiatric textbooks. So, I thought, the
textbook is in part the subjective confession of the author. With his
specific prejudice, with the totality of his being, he stands behind
the objectivity of his experiences and responds to the "disease of
the personality" with the whole of his own personality. Never had I
heard anything of this sort from my teacher at the clinic. In spite of
the fact that Krafft-Ebing's textbook did not differ essentially from
other books of the kind, these few hints cast such a transfiguring
light on psychiatry that I was irretrievably drawn under its spell.

The decision was taken. When I informed my teacher in internal
medicine of my intention, I could read in his face his amazement
and disappointment. My old wound, the feeling of being an outsider
and of alienating others, began to ache again. But now I understood
why. No one, not even I myself, had ever imagined I could become
interested in this obscure bypath. My friends were astounded and
put out, thinking me a fool for throwing up the enviable chance of a
sensible career in internal medicine, which dangled so temptingly
before my nose, in favor of this psychiatric nonsense.

I saw that once again I had obviously got myself into a side alley
where no one could or would follow me. But I knew-and nothing and
nobody could have deflected me from my purpose-that my
decision stood, and that it was fate. It was as though two rivers had
united and in one grand torrent were bearing me inexorably toward
distant goals. This confident feeling that I was a "united double
nature" carried me as if on a magical wave through the
examination, in which I came out at the top. Characteristically, the
stumbling block that lurks in the path of all miracles that turn out too
well tripped me up in the very subject in which I really excelled,
pathological anatomy. By a ridiculous error, in a slide which apart
from all sorts of debris seemed to contain only epithelial cells, I
overlooked some molds hiding in a corner. In the other subjects, I
had even guessed what questions 1 would be asked. Thanks to this,
I cleared several dangerous reefs with flying colors. In revenge, I
was then fooled in the most grotesque way just where I felt most
certain of myself. Had it not been for this I would have had the
highest mark in the examination.

As it was, another candidate received the same number of points
as I did. He was a lone wolf, with a personality quite opaque to me
and suspiciously banal. It was impossible to talk to him about
anything except "shop." He reacted to everything with an enigmatic
smile, which reminded me of the Greek statues at Aegina. He had
an air of superiority, and yet underneath it he seemed embarrassed
and never quite fitted into any situation. Or was it a kind of
stupidity? I could never make him out. The only definite thing about
him was the impression he gave of almost monomaniacal ambition
which precluded interest in anything but sheer facts. A few years
afterward he became schizophrenic. I mention this as a
characteristic example of the parallelism of events. My first book
was on the psychology of dementia praecox (schizophrenia), and in
it my personality with its bias or "personal equation" responded to

this "disease of the personality? I maintained that psychiatry, in the
broadest sense, is a dialogue between the sick psyche and the
psyche of the doctor, which is presumed to be "normal." It is a
coming to terms between the sick personality and that of the
therapist, both in principle equally subjective. My aim was to show
that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of
mental disease but also had a human meaning.

The evening after my last examination I treated myself-for the first
time in my life— to the longed-for luxury of going to the theater. Until
then my finances had not permitted any such extravagance. But I
still had some money left from the sale of the antiques, and this
allowed me not only a visit to the opera but even a trip to Munich
and Stuttgart.

Bizet intoxicated and overwhelmed me, rocked me on the a waves
of an infinite sea. And next day, when the train carried me over the
border into a wider world, the melodies of Carmen accompanied
me. In Munich I saw real classical art for the first time, and this in
conjunction with Bizet's music put me in a springlike, nuptial mood,
whose depth and meaning I could only dimly grasp. Outwardly,
however, it was a dismal week between the first and the ninth of
December, 1900.

In Stuttgart I paid a farewell visit to my aunt, Frau Reimer-Jung,
whose husband was a psychiatrist. She was the daughter of my
paternal grandfather's first marriage to Virginia de Lassaulx. She
was an enchanting old lady with sparkling blue eyes and a vivacious
temperament. She seemed to me immersed in a world of
impalpable fantasies and of memories that refused to go home-the
last breath of a vanishing, irrevocable past. This visit was a final
farewell to the nostalgias of my childhood.

On December 1 0, 1 900, 1 took up my post as assistant at Burgholzli

Mental Hospital, Zurich. I was glad to be in Zurich, for in the course
of the years Basel had become too stuffy for me. For the Baslers no
town exists but their own: only Basel is "civilized," and north of the
river Birs the land of the barbarians begins. My friends could not
understand my going away, and reckoned I would be back in no
time. But that was out of the question, for in Basel I was stamped for
all time as the son of the Reverend Paul Jung and the grandson of
Professor Carl Gustav Jung. I was an intellectual and belonged to a
definite social set. I felt resistances against this, for I could not and
would not let myself be classified. The intellectual atmosphere of
Basel seemed to me enviably cosmopolitan, but the pressure of
tradition was too much for me. When I came to Zurich I felt the
difference at once. Zurich relates to the world not by the intellect but
by commerce. Yet here the air was free, and I had always valued
that. Here you were not weighed down by the brown fog of the
centuries, even though one missed the rich background of culture.
For Basel I have to this day a nostalgic weakness, despite the fact
that I know it no longer is as it was. I still remember the days when
Bachofen and Burckhardt walked in the streets, and behind the
cathedral stood the old chapter house, and the old bridge over the
Rhine, half made of wood.

For my mother it was hard that I was leaving Basel. But I knew that I
could not spare her this pain, and she bore it bravely. She lived
together with my sister, a delicate and rather sickly nature, in every
respect different from me. She was as though born to live the life of
a spinster, and she never married. But she developed a remarkable
personality, and I admired her attitude. She had to undergo an
operation that was considered harmless, but she did not survive it. I
was deeply impressed when I discovered that she had put all her
affairs in order beforehand, down to the last detail. At bottom she
was always a stranger to me, but I had great respect for her. I was
rather emotional, whereas she was always composed, though very

sensitive deep down. I could imagine her spending her days in a
Home for Gentlewomen, just as the only sister of my grandfather
had done.

With my work at Burgholzli, life took on an undivided reality-all
intention, consciousness, duty, and responsibility. It was an entry
into the monastery of the world, a submission to the vow to believe
only in what was probable, average, commonplace, barren of
meaning, to renounce everything strange and significant, and
reduce anything extraordinary to the banal. Henceforth there were
only surfaces that hid nothing, only beginnings without continuations,
accidents without coherence, knowledge, that shrank to ever
smaller circles, failures that claimed to be problems, oppressively
narrow horizons, and the unending desert of routine. For six months
Mocked myself within the monastic walls in order to get accustomed
to the life and spirit of the asylum, and I read through the fifty
volumes of the Allgemeine Zeitschrift for Psychiatric from its very
beginnings, in order to acquaint myself with the psychiatric
mentality. I wanted to know how the human mind reacted to the sight
of its own destruction, for psychiatry seemed to me an articulate
expression of that biological reaction which seizes upon the so-
called healthy mind in the presence of mental illness. My
professional colleagues seemed to me no less interesting than the
patients. In the years that followed I secretly compiled statistics on
the hereditary background of my Swiss colleagues, and. gained
much instruction. I did this for my personal edification as well as for
the sake of understanding the psychiatric mentality.

I need scarcely mention that my concentration and self-imposed
confinement alienated me from my colleagues. They did not know,
of course, how strange psychiatry seemed to me, and how intent I
was on penetrating into its spirit. At that time my interest in therapy
had not awakened, but the pathological variants of so-called
normality fascinated me, because they offered me the longed-for

opportunity to obtain a deeper insight into the psyche in general.

These, then, were the conditions under which my career in
psychiatry began-the subjective experiment out of which my
objective life emerged. I have neither the desire nor the capacity to
stand outside myself and observe my fate in a truly objective way. I
would commit the familiar autobiographical mistake either of
weaving an illusion about how it ought to have been, or of writing an
apologia pro vita sua. In the end, man is an event which cannot
judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others.

IV

Psychiatric Activities

THE YEARS at Burgholzli were my years of apprenticeship.
Dominating my interests and research was the burning question:
"What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?" That was
something which I did not understand then, nor had any of my
colleagues concerned themselves with such problems. Psychiatry
teachers were not interested in what the patient had to say, but
rather in how to make a diagnosis or how to describe symptoms
and to compile statistics. From the clinical point of view which then
prevailed, the human personality of the patient, his individuality, did
not matter at all. Rather, the doctor was confronted with Patient X,
with a long list of cut-and-dried diagnoses and a detailing of
symptoms. Patients were labeled, rubber-stamped with a
diagnosis, and, for the most part, that settled the matter. The
psychology of the mental patient played no role whatsoever.

At this point Freud became vitally important to me, especially
because of his fundamental researches into the psychology of
hysteria and of dreams. For me his ideas pointed the way to a
closer investigation and understanding of individual cases. ; Freud
introduced psychology into psychiatry, although he himself was a
neurologist.

I still recollect very well a case which greatly interested me at the
time. A young woman had been admitted to the hospital, suffering
from "melancholia." The examination was conducted with the usual
care: anamnesis, tests, physical check-ups, and so on. The

diagnosis was schizophrenia, or "dementia praecox," in the phrase
of those days. The prognosis: poor.

This woman happened to be in my section. At first I did not dare to
question the diagnosis. I was still a young man then, a beginner,
and would not have had the temerity to suggest another one. And
yet the case struck me as strange. I had the feeling that it was not a
matter of schizophrenia but of ordinary depression, and resolved to
apply my own method. At the time I was much occupied with
diagnostic association studies, and so I undertook an association
experiment with the patient. In addition, I discussed her dreams with
her. In this way I succeeded in uncovering her past, which the
anamnesis had not clarified. I obtained information directly from the
unconscious, and this infomation revealed a dark and tragic story.

Before the woman married she had known a man, the son of a
wealthy industrialist, in whom all the girls of the neighborhood were
interested. Since she was very pretty, she thought her chances of
catching 'him were fairly good. But apparently he did not care for
her, and so she married another man.

Five years later an old friend visited her. They were talking over old
times, and he said to her, "When you got married it was quite a
shock to someone-your Mr. X" (the wealthy industrialist's son). That
was the moment! Her depression dated from this period, and
several weeks later led to a catastrophe. She was bathing her
children, first her four-year-old girl and then her two-year-old son.
She lived in a country where the water supply was not perfectly
hygienic; there was pure spring water for drinking, and tainted water
from the river for bathing and washing. While she was bathing the
little girl, she saw the child sucking at the sponge, but did not stop
her. She even gave her little son a glass of the impure water to
drink. Naturally, she did this unconsciously, or only half consciously,
for her mind was already under the shadow of the incipient

depression.

A short time later, after the incubation period had passed, the girl
came down with typhoid fever and died. The girl had been her
favorite. The boy was not infected. At that moment the depression
reached its acute stage, and the woman was sent to the institution.

From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess,
and I had learned many of the details of her secret. It was at once
apparent that this was a sufficient reason for her depression.
Essentially it was a psychogenic disturbance and not a case of
schizophrenia.

Now what could be done in the way of therapy? Up to then the
woman had been given narcotics to combat her insomnia and had
been under guard to prevent attempts at suicide. But otherwise
nothing had been done. Physically, she was in good condition.

I was confronted with the problem: Should I speak openly with her or
not? Should I undertake the major operation? I was faced with a
conflict of duties altogether without precedent in my experience. I
had a difficult question of conscience to answer, and had to settle
the matter with myself alone. If I had asked my colleagues, they
would probably have warned me, "For heaven's sake, don't tell the
woman any such thing. That will only make her still crazier." To my
mind, the effect might well be the reverse. In general it may be said
that unequivocal rules scarcely exist in psychology. A question can
be answered one way or another, depending on whether or not we
take the unconscious factors into account. Of course I knew very
well the personal risk I was running: if the patient got worse, I would
be in the soup too!

Nevertheless, I decided to take a chance on a therapy whose
outcome was uncertain. I told her everything I had discovered

through the association test. It can easily be imagined how difficult it
was for me to do this. To accuse a person point-blank of murder is
no small matter. And it was tragic for the patient to have to listen to
it and accept it. But the result was that in two weeks it proved
possible to discharge her, and she was never again
institutionalized.

There were other reasons that caused me to say nothing to my
colleagues about this case. I was afraid of their discussing it and
possibly raising legal questions. Nothing could be proved against
the patient, of course, and yet such a discussion might have had
disastrous consequences for her. Fate had punished her enough! It
seemed to me more meaningful that she should return to life in
order to atone in life for her crime. When she was discharged, she
departed bearing her heavy burden. She had to bear this burden.
The loss of the child had been frightful for her, and her expiation had
already begun with the depression and her confinement to the
institution.

In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a
story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my
mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly
personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is
shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment.
The doctor's task is to find out how to gain that knowledge. In most
cases exploration of the conscious material is insufficient.
Sometimes an association test can open the way; so can the
interpretation of dreams, or long and patient human contact with the
individual. In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never
the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the
whole personality.

In 1905 I became lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich,
and that same year I became senior physician at the Psychiatric

Clinic. I held this position for four years. Then in 1 909 I had to resign
because by this time I was simply over my head in work. In the
course of the years I had acquired so large a private practice that I
could no longer keep up with my tasks. However, I continued my
professorship until the year 1913. I lectured on psychopathology,
and, naturally, also on the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis,
as well as on the psychology of primitives. These were my principal
subjects. During the first Semesters my lectures dealt chiefly with
hypnosis, also with Janet and Flournoy. Later the problem of
Freudian psychoanalysis moved into the foreground.

In my courses on hypnosis I used to inquire into the personal history
of the patients whom I presented to the students. One case I still
remember very well.

A middle-aged woman, apparently with a strong religious bent,
appeared one day. She was fifty-eight years old, and came on
crutches, led by her maid. For seventeen years she had been
suffering from a painful paralysis of the left leg. I placed her in a
comfortable chair and asked her for her story. She began to tell it to
me, and how terrible it all was-the whole long tale of her illness
came out with the greatest circumstantiality. Finally I interrupted her
and said, "Well now, we have no more time for so much talk. I am
now going to hypnotize you."

I had scarcely said the words when she closed her eyes and fell into
a profound trance-without any hypnosis at all! I wondered at this,
but did not disturb her. She went on talking without pause, and
related the most remarkable dreams- dreams that represented a
fairly deep experience of the unconscious. This, however, I did not
understand until years later., At the time I assumed she was in a
kind of delirium. The situation was gradually growing rather
uncomfortable for me. Here were twenty students present, to whom I
was going to demonstrate hypnosis!

After half an hour of this, I wanted to awaken the patient again. She
would not wake up. I became alarmed; it occurred to me that I might
inadvertently have probed into a latent psychosis. It took some ten
minutes before I succeeded in waking her. All the while I dared not
let the students observe my nervousness. When the woman came
to, she was giddy and confused. I said to her, "I am the doctor, and
everything is all right." Whereupon she cried out, "But I am curedl"
threw away her crutches, and was able to walk. Flushed with
embarrassment, I said to the students, "Now you've seen what can
be done with hypnosisl" In fact I had not the slightest idea what had
happened.

That was one of the experiences that prompted me to abandon
hypnosis. I could not understand what had really happened, but the
woman was in fact cured, and departed in the best of spirits. I
asked her to let me hear from her, since I counted on a relapse in
twenty-four hours at the latest. But her pains did not recur in spite of
my skepticism, I had to accept the fact of her cure!

At the first lecture of the summer semester next year, she
reappeared. This time she complained of violent pains in the back
which had, she said, begun only recently. Naturally, I asked myself
whether there was some connection with the resumption of my
lectures. Perhaps she had read the announcement of the lecture in
the newspaper. I asked her when the pain had started, and what
had caused it. She could not recall that anything had happened to
her at any specitic time nor could she offer the slightest explanation.
Finally I elicited the fact that the pains had actually begun on the day
and at the very hour she saw the announcement in the newspaper.
That continued my guess, but I still did not see how the miraculous
cure had come about. I hypnotized her once more-that is to say,
she again fell spontaneously into a trance-and afterward the pain
was gone.

This time I kept her after the lecture in order to find out more about
her life. It turned out that she had a feeble-minded son who was in
my department in the hospital. I knew nothing about this because
she bore her second husband's name and the son was a child of
her first marriage. He was her only child. Naturally, she had hoped
for a talented and successful son, and it had been a terrible blow
when he became mentally ill at an early age. At that time I was still a
young doctor, and represented everything she had hoped her son
might become. Her ambitious longing to be the mother of a hero
therefore fastened upon me. She adopted me as her son, and
proclaimed her miraculous cure far and wide.

In actual fact she was responsible for my local fame as a wizard,
and since the story soon got around, I was indebted to her for my
first private patients. My psychotherapeutic practice began with a
mother's putting me in the place of her mentally ill son! Naturally I
explained the whole matter to her, in all its ramifications. She took it
very well, and did not again suffer a relapse.

That was my first real therapeutic experience-l might say: my first
analysis. I distinctly recall my talk with the old lady. She was
intelligent, and exceedingly grateful that I had taken her seriously
and displayed concern for her fate and that of her son. This had
helped her.

In the beginning I employed hypnosis in my private practice also,
but I soon gave it up because in using it one is only groping in the
dark. One never knows how long an improvement or a cure will last,
and I always had compunctions about working in such uncertainty.
Nor was I fond of deciding on my own what the patient ought to do. I
was much more concerned to learn from the patient himself where
his natural bent would lead him. In order to find that out, careful
analysis of dreams and of other manifestations of the unconscious

was necessary.

During the years 1904-5 I set up a laboratory for experimental
psychopathology at the Psychiatric Clinic. I had a number of
students there with whom I investigated psychic reactions
(i.e. .associations). Franz Riklin, Sr., was my collaborator. Ludwig -
Binswanger was currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the
association experiment in connection with the psychogalvanic
effect, and I wrote my paper "On the Psychological Diagnosis of
Facts." There were also a number of Americans among our
associates, including Frederick Peterson and Charles Ricksher.
Their papers were published in American journals. It was these
association studies which later, in 1909, procured me my invitation
to Clark University; I was asked to lecture on my work.
Simultaneously, and independently of me, Freud was invited. The
degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa was bestowed on both of
us.

The association experiment and the psychogalvanic experiment
were chiefly responsible for my reputation in America. Very soon
many patients from that country were coming to me. I remember
well one of the first cases. An American colleague sent me a
patient. The accompanying diagnosis read "alcoholic
neurasthenia." The prognosis called him "incurable." My colleague
had therefore taken the precaution of advising the patient to see
also a certain neurological authority in Berlin, for he expected that
my attempt at therapy would lead to nothing. The patient came for
consultation, and after I had talked a little with him I saw that the
man had an ordinary neurosis, of whose psychic origins he had no
inkling. I made an association test and discovered that he was
suffering from the effects of a formidable mother complex. He came
from a rich and respected family, had a likeable wife and no cares-
externally speaking. Only he drank too much. The drinking was a
desperate attempt to narcotize himself, to forget his oppressive

situation. Naturally, it did not help.

His mother was the owner of a large company, and the unusually
talented son occupied a leading post in the firm. He really should
long since have escaped from his oppressive subordination to his
mother, but he could not summon up the resolution to throw up his
excellent position. Thus he remained chained to his mother, who
had installed him in the business. Whenever he was with her, or had
to submit to her interference with his work, he would start drinking in
order to stupefy or discharge his emotions. A part of him did not
really want to leave the comfortably warm nest, and against his own
instincts he was allowing himself to be seduced by wealth and
comfort. After brief treatment he stopped drinking, and considered
himself cured. But I told him, "I do not guarantee that you will not
relapse into the same state if you return to your former situation" He
did not believe me, and returned home to America in fine fettle.

As soon as he was back under his mother's influence, the drinking
began again. Thereupon I was called by her to a consultation during
her stay in Switzerland. She was an intelligent woman, but was a
real "power devil." I saw what the son had to contend with, and
realized that he did not have the strength to resist. Physically, too,
he was rather delicate and no match for his mother. I therefore
decided upon an act of force majeure. Behind his back I gave his
mother a medical certificate to the effect that her son's alcoholism
rendered him incapable of fululling the requirements of his job. I
recommended his discharge. This advice was followed-and the
son, of course, was furious with me.

Here I had done something which normally would be considered
unethical for a medical man. But I knew that for the patient's sake I
had had to take this step.

His further development? Separated from his mother, his own

personality was able to unfold. He made a brilliant career-in spite
of, or rather just because of the strong horse pill I had given him. His
wife was grateful to me, for her husband had not only overcome his
alcoholism, but had also struck out on his own individual path with
the greatest success. Nevertheless, for years I had a guilty
conscience about this patient because I had made out that
certificate behind his back, though I was certain that only such an
act could free him. And indeed, once his liberation was
accomplished, the neurosis disappeared.

In my practice I was constantly impressed by the way the human
psyche reacts to a crime committed unconsciously. After all, that
yonmg woman was initially not aware that she had killed her child.
And yet she had fallen into a condition that appeared to be the
expression of extreme consciousness of guilt.

I once had a similar case which I have never forgotten. A lady came
to my office. She refused to give her name, said it did not matter,
since she wished to have only the one consultation. It was apparent
that she belonged to the upper levels of society. She had been a
doctor, she said. What she had to communicate to me was a
confession; some twenty years ago she had committed a murder
out of jealousy. She had poisoned her best friend because she
wanted to marry the friend's husband. She had thought that if the
murder was not discovered, it would not disturb her. She wanted to
marry the husband, and the simplest way was to eliminate her
friend. Moral considerations were of no importance to her, she
thought.

The consequences? She had in fact married the man, but he died
soon afterward, relatively young. During the following years a
number of strange things happened. The daughter of this marriage
endeavored to get away from her as soon as she was grown up.
She married young and vanished from view, drew farther and

farther away, and ultimately the mother lost all contact with her.

This lady was a passionate horsewoman and owned several riding
horses of which she was extremely fond. One day she discovered
that the horses were beginning to grow nervous under her. Even her
favorite shied and threw her. Finally she had to give up riding.
Thereafter she clung to her dogs. She owned an unusually beautiful
wolfhound to which she was greatly attached. As chance would
have it, this very dog was stricken with paralysis. With that, her cup
was full; she felt that she was morally done for. She had to confess,
and for this purpose she came to me. She was a murderess, but on
top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits
such a crime destroys his own soul. The murderer has already
passed sentence on himself. If someone has committed a crime
and is caught, he suffers judicial punishment. If he has done it
secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains
undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon
him, as our case shows. It comes out in the end. Sometimes it
seems as if even animals and plants "know" it.

As a result of the murder, the woman was plunged into unbearable
loneliness. She had even become alienated from animals. And in
order to shake off this loneliness, she had made me share her
knowledge. She had to have someone who was not a murderer to
share the secret. She wanted to find a person who could accept her
confession without prejudice, for by so doing she would achieve
once more something resembling a relationship to humanity. And
the person would have to be a doctor rather than a professional
confessor. She would have suspected a priest of listening to her
because of his office, and of not accepting the facts for their own
sake but for the purpose of moral judgment. She had seen people
and animals turn away from her, and had been so struck by this
silent verdict that she could not have endured any further
condemnation.

I never found out who she was, nor do I have any proof that her story
was true. Sometimes I have asked myself what might have become
of her. For that was by no means the end of her iourney. Perhaps
she was driven ultimately to suicide. I cannot Imagine how she could
have gone on living in that utter loneliness.

Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a
certain orientation; but they do not help the patient. The crucial thing
is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the
human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor's therapy
begin to operate. A case demonstrated this to me most cogently[3]

The case concerned an old patient in the women's ward. She was
about seventy-five, and had been bedridden for forty years. Almost
fifty years ago she had entered the institution, but there was no one
left who could recall her admittance; everyone who had been there
had since died. Only one head nurse, who had been working at the
institution for thirty-five years, still remembered something of the
patient's story. The old woman could not speak, and could only take
fluid or semi-fluid nourishment. She ate with her fingers, letting the
food drip off them into her mouth. Sometimes it would take her
almost two hours to consume a cup of milk. When not eating, she
made curious rhythmic motions with her hands and arms. I did not
understand what they meant. I was profoundly impressed by the
degree of destruction that can be wrought by mental disease, but
saw no possible explanation. At the clinical lectures she used to be
presented as a catatonic form of dementia praecox, but that meant
nothing to me, for these words did not contribute in the slightest to
an understanding of the significance and origin of those curious
gestures.

The impression this case made upon me typifies my reaction to the
psychiatry of the period. When I became an assistant, I had the

feeling that I understood nothing whatsoever about what psychiatry
purported to be. I felt extremely uncomfortable beside my chief and
my colleagues, who assumed such airs of certainty while I was
groping perplexedly in the dark. For I regarded the main task of
psychiatry as understanding the things that were taking place within
the sick mind, and as yet I knew nothing about these things. Here I
was engaged in a profession in which I did not know my way about!

Late one evening, as I was walking through the ward, I saw the old
woman still making her mysterious movements, and

3 Cf. The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (CW 3), pp. 171-72.

again asked myself, "Why must this be?" Thereupon I went to our
old head nurse and asked whether the patient had always been that
way. "Yes," she replied. "But my predecessor told me she used to
make shoes." I then checked through her yellowing case history
once more, and sure enough, there was a note to the effect that she
was in the habit of making cobbler's motions. In the past
shoemakers used to hold shoes between their knees and draw the
threads through the leather with precisely such movements. (Village
cobblers can still be seen doing this today.) When the patient died
shortly afterward, her elder brother came to the funeral. "Why did
your sister lose her sanity?" I asked him. He told me that she had
been in love with a shoemalcer who for some reason had not
wanted to marry her, and that when he finally rejected her she had
"gone off." The shoemaker movements indicated an identification
with her sweetheart which had lasted until her death. That case
gave me my first inkling of the psychic origins of dementia praecox.
Henceforth I devoted all my attention to the meaningful connections
in a psychosis.

Another patient's story revealed to me the psychological
background of psychosis and, above all, of the "senseless"

delusions. From this case I was able for the first time to understand
the language of schizophrenics, which had hitherto been regarded
as meaningless. The patient was Babette S., whose story I have
published elsewhere. In 1 908 I delivered a lecture on her in the town
hall of Zurich.

She came out of the Old Town of Zurich, out of narrow, dirty streets
where she had been born in poverty-stricken circumstances and
had grown up in a mean environment. Her sister was a prostitute,
her father a drunkard. At the age of thirty-nine she succumbed to a
paranoid form of dementia praecox, with characteristic
megalomania. When I saw her, she had been in the institution for
twenty years. She had served as an object lesson to hundreds of
medical students. In her they had seen the uncanny process of
psychic disintegration; she was a classic

4 CF. "The Psychology of Dementia Precox" and "The Content of the
Psychoses," in The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease (CW 3).

case. Babette was completely demented and given to saying the
craziest things which made no sense at all. I tried with all my might
to understand the content of her abstruse utterances. For example,
she would say, "I am the Lorelei"; the reason for that was that the
doctors, when trying to understand her case, would always say, "Ich
weiss nicht, was soil es bedeuten." " Or she would wail, "I am
Socrates' deputy." That, as I discovered, was intended to mean: "I
am unjustly accused like Socrates." Absurd outbursts like: "I am the
double polytechnic irreplaceable," or, "I am plum cake on a corn-
meal bottom," "I am Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet
butter," "Naples and I must supply the world with noodles," signified
an increase in her self-valuation, that is to say, a compensation for
inferiority feelings.

My preoccupation with Babette and other such cases convinced me

that much of what we had hitherto regarded as senseless was not
as crazy as it seemed. More than once I have seen that even with
such patients there remains in the background a personality which
must be called normal. It stands looking on, so to speak.
Occasionally, too, this personality- usually by way of voices or
dreams-can make altogether sensible remarks and objections. It
can even, when physical illness ensues, move into the foreground
again and make the patient, seem almost normal.

I once had to treat a schizophrenic old woman who showed me very
distinctly the "normal" personality in the background. This was a
case which could not be cured, only cared for. Every physician, after
all, has patients whom he cannot hope to cure, for whom he can
only smooth the path to death. She heard voices which were
distributed throughout her entire body, and a voice in the middle of
the thorax was "God's voice."

"We must rely on that voice," I said to her, and was astonished at
my own courage. As a rule this voice made very sensible remarks,
and with its aid I managed very well with the patient. Once the voice
said, "Let him test you on the Bible!" She brought along an old,
tattered, much-read Bible, and at each visit I had to assign her a
chapter to read. The next time I had to test her on it. I did this for
about seven years, once every two

5 "I know not what it means": the first line of Heine's famous poem
"Die Lorelei"

weeks. At first I felt very odd in this role, but after a while I realized
what the lessons signified. In this way her attention was kept alert,
so that she did not sink deeper into the disintegrating dream. The
result was that after some six years the voices which had formerly
been everywhere had retired to the left half of her body, while the
right half was completely free of them. Nor had the intensity of the

phenomena been doubled on the left side; it was much the same as
in the past. Hence it must be concluded that the patient was cured-
at least halfway. That was an unexpected success, for I would not
have imagined that these memory exercises could have a
therapeutic effect.

Through my work with the patients I realized that paranoid ideas
and hallucinations contain a germ of meaning. A personality, a life
history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis.
The fault is ours if we do not understand them. It dawned upon me
then for the first time that a general psychology of the personality
lies concealed within psychosis, and that even here we come upon
the old human conflicts. Although patients may appear dull and
apathetic, or totally imbecilic, there is more going on in their minds,
and more that is meaningful, than there seems to be. At bottom we
discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we
encounter the substratum of our own natures.

It was always astounding to me that psychiatry should have taken so
long to look into the content of the psychoses. No one concerned
himself with the meaning of fantasies, or thought to ask why this
patient had one kind of fantasy, another an altogether different one;
or what it signified when, for instance, a patient had the fantasy of
being persecuted by the Jesuits, or when another imagined that the
Jews wanted to poison him, or a third was convinced that the police
were after him. Such questions seemed altogether uninteresting to
doctors of those days. The fantasies were simply lumped together
under some generic name as, for instance, "ideas of persecution."
It seems equally odd to me that my investigations of that time are
almost forgotten today. Already at the beginning of the century I
treated Schizophrenia psychotherapeutically. That method,
therefore, is not something that has only just been discovered. It did,
however, take a long time before people began to introduce
psychology into psychiatry.

While I was still at the clinic, I had to be most circumspect about
treating my schizophrenic patients, or I would have been accused of
woolgathering. Schizophrenia was considered incurable. If one did
achieve some improvement with a case of schizophrenia, the
answer was that it had not been real schizophrenia. When Freud
visited me in Zurich in 1908, I demonstrated the case of Babette to
him. Afterward he said to me, "You know, Jung, what you have
found out about this patient is certainly interesting. But how in the
world were you able to bear spending hours and days with this
phenomenally ugly female?" I must have given him a rather dashed
look, for this idea had never occurred to me. In a way I regarded the
woman as a pleasant old creature because she had such lovely
delusions and said such interesting things. And after all, even in her
insanity, the human being emerged from a cloud of grotesque
nonsense. Therapeutically, nothing was accomplished with Babette;
she had been sick for too long. But I have seen other cases in which
this kind of attentive entering into the personality of the patient
produced a lasting therapeutic effect.

Regarding them from the outside, all we see of the mentally ill is
their tragic destruction, rarely the life of that side of the psyche
which is turned away from us. Outward appearances are frequently
deceptive, as I discovered to my astonishment in the case of a
young catatonic patient. She was eighteen years old, and came
from a cultivated family. At the age of fifteen she had been seduced
by her brother and abused by a schoolmate. From her sixteenth
year on, she retreated into isolation. She concealed herself from
people, and ultimately the only emotional relationship left to her was
one with a vicious watch dog which belonged to another family, and
which she tried to win over. She grew steadily odder, and at
seventeen was taken to the mental hospital, where she spent a year
and a half. She heard voices, refused food, and was completely

mutistic (i.e., no long spoke). When I first saw her she was in a
typical catatonic state.

In the course of many weeks I succeeded, very gradually, in
persuading her to speak. After overcoming many resistances, she
told me that she had lived on the moon. The moon, it seemed, was
inhabited, but at first she had seen only men. They had at once
taken her with them and deposited her in a sublunar dwelling where
their children and wives were kept. For on the high mountains of the
moon there lived a vampire who kidnapped and killed the women
and children, so that the moon people were threatened with
extinction. That was the reason for the sublunar existence of the
feminine half of the population.

My patient made up her mind to do something for the moon people,
and planned to destroy the vampire. After long preparations, she
waited for the vampire on the platform of a tower which had been
erected for this purpose. After a number of nights she at last saw
the monster approaching from afar, winging his way toward her like
a great black bird. She took her long sacrificial knife, concealed it
in her gown, and waited for the vampire's arrival. Suddenly he stood
before her. He had several pairs of wings. His face and entire figure
were covered by them, so that she could see nothing but his
feathers. Wonder-struck, she was seized by curiosity to find out
what he really looked like. She approached, hand on the knife.
Suddenly the wings opened and a man of unearthly beauty stood
before her. He enclosed her in his winged arms with an iron grip, so
that she could no longer wield the knife. In any case she was so
spellbound by the vampire's look that she would not have been
capable of striking. He raised her from the platform and flew off with
her.

After this revelation she was once again able to speak without
inhibition, and now her resistances emerged. It seemed that I had

stopped her return to the moon; she could no longer escape from
the earth. This world was not beautiful, she said, but the moon was
beautiful, and life there was rich in meaning. Sometime later she
suffered a relapse into her catatonia, and I had to have her taken to
a sanatorium. For a while she was violently insane.

When she was discharged after some two months, it was once
again possible to talk with her. Gradually she came to see that life
on earth was unavoidable. Desperately, she fought against this
conclusion and its consequences, and had to be sent back to the
sanatorium. Once I visited her in her cell and said to her, "All this
won't do you any good; you cannot return to the moon!" She took
this in silence and with an appearance of utter apathy. This time she
was released after a short stay and resigned herself to her fate.

For a while she took a job as nurse in a sanatorium. There was an
assistant doctor there who made a somewhat rash approach to her.
She responded with a revolver shot. Luckily, the man was only
slightly wounded. But the incident revealed that she went about with
a revolver all the time. Once before, she had turned up with a
loaded gun. During the last interview, at the end of the treatment,
she gave it to me. When I asked in amazement what she was doing
with it, she replied, "I would have shot you down if you had failed
me!"

When the excitement over the shooting had subsided, she returned
to her native town. She married, had several children, and survived
two world wars in the East, without ever again suffering a relapse.

What can be said by way of interpretation of these fantasies? As a
result of the incest to which she had been subjected as a girl, she
felt humiliated in the eyes of the world, but elevated the realm of
fantasy. She had been transported into a mythic- realm; for incest is
traditionally a prerogative of royalty and divinities. The

consequence was complete alienation from the world, a state of
psychosis. She became "extramundane," as it were, and lost
contact with humanity. She plunged into cosmic distances, into
outer space, where she met with the winged demon. As is the rule
with such things, she projected his figure onto me during the
treatment. Thus I was automatically threatened with death, as was
everyone who might have persuade her to return to normal human
life. By telling me her story she had in a sense betrayed the demon
and attached herself to earthly human being. Hence she was able to
return to life and even to marry.

Thereafter I regarded the sufferings of the mentally ill in different
light. For I had gained insight into the richness an importance of
their inner experience.

I am often asked about my psychotherapeutic or analytic method. I
cannot reply unequivocally to the question. Therapy is different in
every case. When a doctor tells me that he adheres strictly to this or
that method, I have my doubts about his therapeutic effect. So much
is said in the literature about the resistance of the patient that it
would almost seem as if the doctor were trying to put something
over on him, whereas the cure ought to grow naturally out of the
patient himself. Psycho- therapy and analysis are as varied as are
human individuals. I treat every patient as individually as possible,
because the solution of the problem is always an individual one.
Universal rules can be postulated only with a grain of salt. A
psychological truth is valid only if it can be reversed. A solution
which would be out of the question for me may be just the right one
for someone else. "

Naturally, a doctor must be familiar with the so-called "methods."
But he must guard against falling into any specific, routine
approach. In general one must guard against theoretical
assumptions. Today they may be valid, tomorrow it may be the turn

of other assumptions. In my analyses they play no part. I am
unsystematic very much by intention. To my mind, in dealing with
individuals, only individual understanding will do. We need a
different language for every patient. In one analysis I can be heard
talking the Adlerian dialect, in another the Freudian.

The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to
another. Analysis is a dialogue demanding two partners. Analyst
and patient sit facing one another, eye to eye; the doctor has
something to say, but so has the patient.

Since the essence of psychotherapy is not the application of a
method, psychiatric study alone does not suffice. I myself had to
work for a very long time before I possessed the equipment for
psychotherapy. As early as 1 909, I realized that I could not treat
latent psychoses if I did not understand their symbolism. It was then
that I began to study mythology.

With cultivated and intelligent patients the psychiatrist needs more
than merely professional knowledge. He must understand, aside
from all theoretical assumptions, what really motivates the patient.
Otherwise he stirs up unnecessary resistances. What counts, after
all, is not whether a theory is corroborated, but whether the patient
grasps himself as an individual. This, however, is not possible
without reference to the collective views, concerning which the
doctor ought to be informed. For that, mere medical training does
not suffice, for the horizon of the human psyche embraces infinitely
more than the limited purview of the doctor's consulting room.

The psyche is distinctly more complicated and inaccessible than
the body. It is, so to speak, the half of the world which comes into
existence only when we become conscious of it. For that reason the
psyche is not only a personal but a world problem, and the
psychiatrist has to deal with an entire world.

Nowadays we can see as never before that the peril which
threatens all of us comes not from nature, but from man, from the
psyches of the individual and the mass. The psychic aberration of
man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our
psyche functions properly. If certain persons lose their heads
nowadays, a hydrogen bomb will go off.

The psychotherapist, however, must understand not only the patient;
it is equally important that he should understand himself. For that
reason the sine quo non is the analysis of the analyst, what is called
the training analysis. The patient's treatment begins with the doctor,
so to speak. Only if the doctor knows how to cope with himself and
his own problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the
same. Only then. In the training analysis the doctor must learn to
know his own psyche; and to take it seriously. If he cannot do that,
the patient will not learn either. He will lose a portion of his psyche,
just as the doctor has lost that portion of his psyche which he has
not learned to understand. It is not enough, therefore, for the training
analysis to consist in acquiring a system of concepts. The
analysand must realize that it concerns himself, that the training
analysis is a bit of real life and is not a method which can be
learned by rote. The student who does not grasp that fact in his own
training analysis will have to pay dearly for the failure later on.

Though there is treatment known as "minor psychotherapy," in any
thoroughgoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and
doctor is called into play. There are many cases which the doctor
cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters
are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees
himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In
the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not
to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. Then the
doctor's whole being is challenged.

The therapist must at all times keep watch over himself, over the
way he is reacting to his patient. For we do not react only with our
consciousness. Also we must always be asking ourselves: How is
our unconscious experiencing this situation? We must therefore
observe our dreams, pay the closest attention and study ourselves
just as carefully as we do the patient. Otherwise the entire treatment
may go off the rails. I shall give a single example of this.

I once had a patient, a highly intelligent woman, who for various
reasons aroused my doubts. At first the analysis went very well, but
after a while I began to feel that I was no longer getting at the
correct interpretation of her dreams, and I thought I also noticed an
increasing shallowness in our dialogue. I therefore decided to talk
with my patient about this, since it had of course not escaped her
that something was going wrong. The night before I was to speak
with her, I had the following dream.

I was walking down a highway through a valley in late-afternoon
sunlight. To my right was a steep hill. At its top stood a castle, and
on the highest tower there was a woman sitting on a kind of
balustrade. In order to see her properly, I had to bend my head far
back. I awoke with a crick in the back of my neck. Even in the
dream I had recognized the woman as my patient.

The interpretation was immediately apparent to me. If in the dream I
had to look up at the patient in this fashion, in reality I had probably
been looking down on her. Dreams are, after all, compensations for
the conscious attitude. I told her of the dream and my interpretation.
This produced an immediate change in the situation, and the
treatment once more began to move forward.

As a doctor I constantly have to ask myself what kind of message
the patient is bringing me. What does he mean to me? If he means

nothing, I have no point of attack. The doctor is effective only when
he himself is affected. "Only the wounded physician heals." But
when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has
no effect. I take my patients seriously. Perhaps I am confronted with
a problem just as much as they. It often happens that the patient is
exactly the right plaster for the doctor's sore spot. Because this is
so, duffcult situations can arise for the doctor too-or rather,
especially for the doctor.

Every therapist ought to have a control by some third person, so
that he remains open to another point of view. Even the pope has a
confessor. I always advise analysts: "Have a father confessor, or a
mother confessor!" Women are particularly gifted for playing such a
part. They often have excellent intuition and a trenchant critical
insight, and can see what men have up their sleeves, at times see
also into men's anima intrigues. They see aspects that the man
does not see. That is why no woman has ever been convinced that
her husband is a superman!

It is understandable that a person should undergo analysis if he has
a neurosis; but if he feels he is normal, he is under no compulsion to
do so. Yet I can assure you, I have had some astonishing
experiences with so-called "normality." Once I encountered an
entirely "normal" pupil. He was a doctor, and came to me with the
best recommendations from an old colleague. He had been his
assistant and had later taken over practice. Now he had a normal
practice, normal success, a normal wife, normal children, lived in a
normal little house in a normal little town, had a normal income and
probably a normal, diet. He wanted to be an analyst. I said to him,
"Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to
know yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right,
how can the patient be made right? If you are not convinced, how
can you convince him? You yourself must be the real stuff. If you are
not, God help you! Then you will lead patients astray. Therefore you

must first accept an analysis of yourself.

That was all right, the man said, but almost at once followed this
with: "I have no problems to tell you about." That should have been a
warning to me. I said, "Very well, then we can examine your
dreams? "I have no dreams," he said. "You will soon have some," I
responded. Anyone else would probably have dreamt that very
night. But he was unable to recall any dreams. So it went on for
about two weeks, and I began to feel rather uneasy about the whole
affair.

At last an impressive dream turned up. I am going to tell it because
it shows how important it is, in practical psychiatry, to understand
dreams. He dreamt that he was traveling by railroad. The train had
a two-hour stop in a certain city. Since he did not know the city and
wanted to see something of it, he set out toward the city center.
There he found a medieval building, probably the town hall, and
went into it. He wandered down long corridors and came upon
handsome rooms, their walls lined with old paintings and line
tapestries. Precious old objects stood about. Suddenly he saw that
it had grown darker, and the sun had set. He thought, I must get
back to the railroad station. At this moment he discovered that he
was lost, and no longer knew where the exit was. He started in
alarm, and simultaneously realized that he had not met a single
person in this building. He began to feel uneasy, and quickened his
pace, hoping to run into someone. But he met no one. Then he
came to a large door, and thought with relief: That is the exit. He
opened the door and discovered that he had stumbled upon a
gigantic room. It was so huge and dark that he could not even see
the opposite wall. Profoundly alarmed, the dreamer ran across the
great, empty room, hoping to find the exit on the other side. Then he
saw-precisely in the middle of the room-something white on the
floor. As he approached he discovered that it was an idiot child of

about two years old. It was sitting on a chamber pot and had
smeared itself with feces. At that moment he awoke with a cry, in a
state of panic.

I knew all I needed to know-here was a latent psychosis! I must say
I sweated as I tried to lead him out of that dream. I had to represent
it to him as something quite innocuous, and gloss over all the
perilous details.

What the dream says is approximately this: the trip on which he sets
out is the trip to Zurich. He remains there, however, for only a short
time. The child in the center of the room is himself as a two-year-old
child. In small children, such uncouth behavior is somewhat unusual,
but still possible. They may be intrigued by their feces, which are
colored and have an odd smell. Raised in a city environment, and
possibly along strict lines, a child might easily be guilty of such a
failing.

But the dreamer, the doctor, was no child; he was a grown man.
And therefore the dream image in the center of the room is a
sinister symbol. When he told me the dream, I realized that his
normality was a compensation. I had caught him in the nick of time,
for the latent psychosis was within a hair's breadth of breaking out
and becoming manifest. This had to be prevented. Finally, with the
aid of one of his other dreams, I succeeded in finding an
acceptable pretext for ending the training analysis. We were both of
us very glad to stop. I had not informed him of my diagnosis, but he
had probably become aware that he was on the verge of a fatal
panic, for he had a dream in which he was being pursued by a
dangerous maniac. Immediately afterward he returned home. He
never again stirred up the unconscious. His emphatic normality
reflected a personality which would not have been developed but
simply shattered by a confrontation with the unconscious. These
latent psychoses are the betes noires of psychotherapists, since

they are often very difficult to recognize.

With this, we come to the question of lay analysis. I am in favor of
non-medical men studying psychotherapy and practicing it; but in
dealing with latent psychoses there is the risk of their making
dangerous mistakes. Therefore I favor laymen working as analysts,
but under the guidance of a professional physician. As soon as a
lay analyst feels the slightest bit uncertain, he ought to consult his
mentor. Even for doctors it is difficult to recognize and treat a latent
schizophrenia; all the more so for laymen. But I have repeatedly
found that laymen who have practiced psychotherapy for years, and
who have themselves been in analysis, are shrewd and capable.
Moreover there are not enough doctors practicing psychotherapy.
For such practice, long and thorough training is necessary, and a
wide culture which very few possess.

The relationship between doctor and patient, especially when a
transference on the part of the patient occurs, or a more or less
unconscious identification of doctor and patient, can lead to
parapsychological phenomena. I have frequently run into this. One
such case which was particularly impressive was that of a patient
whom I had pulled out of a psychogenic depression. He went back
home and married; but I did not care for his wife. The first time I saw
her, I had an uneasy feeling. Her husband was grateful to me, and I
observed that I was a thorn in her side because of my influence over
him. It frequently happens that women who do not really love their
husbands are jealous and destroy their friendships. They want the
husband to belong entirely to them because they themselves do not
belong to him. The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.

The wife's attitude placed a tremendous burden on the patient
which he was incapable of coping with. Under its pressure he
relapsed, after a year of marriage, into a new depression.
Foreseeing this possibility, I had arranged with him that he was to

get in touch with me at once if he observed his spirits sinking. He
neglected to do so, partly because of his wife, who scoffed at his
moods. I heard not a word from him.

At that time I had to deliver a lecture in B. I returned to my hotel
around midnight. I sat with some friends for a while after the lecture,
then went to bed, but I lay awake for a long time. At about two
o'clock-l must have just fallen asleep-l awoke with a start, and had
the feeling that someone had come into the room; I even had the
impression that the door had been hastily opened. I instantly turned
on the light, but there was nothing. Someone might have mistaken
the door, 1 thought, and I looked into the corridor. But it was still as
death. "Odd," I thought, "someone did come into the room!" Then I
tried to recall exactly what had happened, and it occurred to me that
I had been awakened by a feeling of dull pain, as though something
had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull. The following
day I received a telegram saying that my patient had committed
suicide. He had shot himself. Later, I learned that the bullet had
come to rest in the back wall of the skull. This experience was a
genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed
in connection with an archetypal situation— in this case, death. By
means of a relativization of time and space in the unconscious it
could well be that I had perceived something which in reality was
taking place elsewhere. The collective unconscious is common to
all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called the "sympathy of
all things." In this case the unconscious had knowledge of my
patient's condition. All that evening, in fact, 1 had felt curiously
restive and nervous, very much in contrast to my usual mood.

I never try to convert a patient to anything, and never exercise any
compulsion. What matters most to me is that the patient should
reach his own view of things. Under my treatment a pagan
becomes a pagan and a Christian a Christian, a Jew a Jew,
according to what his destiny prescribes for him.

I well recall the case of a Jewish woman who had lost her faith. It
began with a dream of mine in which a young girl, unknown to me,
came to me as a patient. She outlined her case to me, and while
she was talking, I thought, "I don't understand her at all. I don't
understand what it is all about." But suddenly it occurred to me that
she must have an unusual father complex. That was the dream.

For the next day I had down in my appointment book a consultation
for four o'clock. A young woman appeared. She was Jewish,
daughter of a wealthy banker, pretty, chic, and highly intelligent. She
had already undergone an analysis, but the doctor acquired a
transference to her and finally begged her not to come to him any
more, for if she did, it would mean the destruction of his marriage.

The girl had been suffering for years from a severe anxiety
neurosis, which this experience naturally worsened. I began with an
anamnesis, but could discover nothing special. She was well-
adapted, Westernized Jewess, enlightened down to her bones. At
first I could not understand what her trouble was. Suddenly my
dream occurred to me, and I thought, "Good Lord, so this is the little
girl of my dream." Since, however, I could detect not a trace of a
father complex in her, I asked her, as I am in the habit of doing in
such cases, about her grandfather. For a brief moment she closed
her eyes, and I realized at once that here lay the heart of the
problem. I therefore asked her to tell me about this grandfather, and
learned that he had been a rabbi and had belonged to a Jewish
sect. "Do you mean the Chassidim?" I asked. She said yes. I
pursued my questioning. "If he was a rabbi, was he by any chance a
zaddik?" "Yes," she replied, "it is said that he was a kind of saint
and also possessed second sight. But that is all nonsense. There is
no such thing!"

With that I had concluded the anamnesis and understood the history

of her neurosis. I explained to her, "Now I am going to tell you
something that you may not be able to accept. Your grandfather
was a zaddik. Your father became an apostate to the Jewish faith.
He betrayed the secret and turned his back on God. And you have
your neurosis because the fear of God has got into you." That struck
her like a bolt of lightning.

The following night I had another dream. A reception was taking
place in my house, and behold, this girl was there too. She came up
to me and asked, "Haven't you got an umbrella? It is raining so
hard." I actually found an umbrella, fumbled around with it to open it,
and was on the point of giving it to her. But what happened instead?
I handed it to her on my knees, as if she were a goddess.

I told this dream to her, and in a week the neurosis had vanished."
The dream had showed me that she was not just a superficial little
girl, but that beneath the surface were the makings of a saint. She
had no mythological ideas, and therefore the most essential feature
of her nature could find no way to express itself. All her conscious
activity was directed toward flirtation, clothes, and sex, because
she knew of nothing else. She knew only the intellect and lived a
meaningless life. In reality she was a child of God whose destiny
was to fulfill His secret will. I had to awaken mythological and
religious ideas in her, for she belonged to that class of human
beings of whom spiritual activity

6 This case is distinguished from most of Jung's cases by the brevity of the
treatment. -A. J.

is demanded. Thus her life took on a meaning, and no trace of the
neurosis was left. In this case I had applied no "method," but had
sensed the presence of the numen. My explaining this to her had
accomplished the cure. Method did not matter here; what mattered
was the "fear of God."[7]

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content
themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of
life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or
money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have
attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined
within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their has not sufficient content,
sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more
spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. For that
reason the idea of development was always of the highest
importance to me.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but those who
had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep.
Even in this day and age the believer has the opportunity, in his
church, to live the "symbolic life." We need only think of the
experience of the Mass, of baptism, of imitatio Christi, and many
other aspects of religion. But to live and experience symbols
presupposes a vital participation on part of the believer, and only
too often this is lacking in people today. In the neurotic it is
practically always lacking. In such cases we have to observe
whether the unconscious will not spontaneously bring up symbols to
replace what is lacking. But the question remains of whether a
person who has symbolic dreams or visions will also be able to
understand their meaning and take the consequences upon himself.

There is, for example, the case of the theologian which I described
in "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." [8] He had a certain
dream which was frequently repeated. He dream that he was
standing on a slope from which he had a beautiful

7 Cf. The Symbolic Life, Pastoral Psychology Guild Lecture, No. Bo
(London 1954). p- 18. 8 The Archetypes and the Collects Unconscious
(CW 9, i), pp. 17-18.

view of a low valley covered with dense woods. In the dream he
knew that in the middle of the woods there was a lake, and he also
knew that hitherto something had always prevented him from going
there. But this time he wanted to carry out his plan. As he
approached the lake, the atmosphere grew uncanny, and suddenly
a light gust of wind passed over the surface of the water, which
rippled darkly. He awoke with a cry of terror.

At first this dream seems incomprehensible. But as a theologian
the dreamer should have remembered the "pool" whose waters
were stirred by a sudden wind, and in which the sick were bathed-
the pool of Bethesda. An angel descended and touched the water,
which thereby acquired curative powers. The light wind is the
pneuma which bloweth where it listeth And that terrified the
dreamer. An unseen presence is suggested, a numen that lives its
own life and in whose presence man shudders. The dreamer was
reluctant to accept the association with the pool of Bethesda. He
wanted nothing of it, for such things are met with only in the Bible, or
at most on Sunday mornings as the subjects of sermons, and have
nothing to do with psychology. All very well to speak of the Holy
Ghost on occasions-but it is not a phenomenon to be experienced!

I knew that the dreamer should have overcome his fright and, as it
were, got over his panic. But I never force the issue if a patient is
unwilling to go the way that has been revealed to him and take the
consequences. I do not subscribe to the facile assumption that the
patient is blocked merely by ordinary resistances. Resistances-
especially when they are stubborn-merit attention, for they are often
warnings which must not be overlooked. The cure may be a poison
that not everyone can take, or an operation which, when it is
contraindicated, can prove fatal.

Wherever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into
the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fright, and

many run away. Such was the case with this theologian. I am of
course aware that theologians are in a more difficult situation than
others. On the one hand they are closer to religion, but on the other
hand they are more bound by church and dogma. The risk of inner
experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most
human beings. The possibility that such experience might have
psychic reality is anathema to them. All very well if it has a
supernatural or at least a "historical" foundation. But psychic? Face
to face with this question, the patient will often show an
unsuspected but profound contempt for the psyche.

In contemporary psychotherapy the demand is often made that the
doctor or psychotherapist should "go along" with the patient and his
affects. I don't consider that to be always the right course.
Sometimes active intervention on the part of the doctor is required.

Once a lady of the aristocracy came to me who was in the habit of
slapping her employees-including her doctors. She suffered from a
compulsion neurosis and had been under treatment in a
sanatorium. Naturally, she had soon dispensed the obligatory slap
to the head physician. In her eyes, after all, was only a superior valet
de chambre. She was paying the bills wasn't she? This doctor sent
her on to another institution and there the same scene was
repeated. Since the lady was not really insane, but evidently had to
be handled with kid gloves the hapless doctor sent her on to me.

She was a very stately and imposing person, six feet tall-and there
was power behind her slaps, I can tell you! She came, then, and we
had a very good talk. Then came the moment when I had to say
something unpleasant to her. Furious, she sprang her feet and
threatened to slap me. I, too, jumped up, and said to her, "Very well,
you are the lady. You hit first-ladies first! But then I hit back!" And I
meant it. She fell back into her chair and deflated before my eyes.
"No one has ever said that to me beforel" she protested. From that

moment on, the therapy began to succeed.

What this patient needed was a masculine reaction. In this case it
would have been entirely wrong to "go along." That would have
been worse than useless. She had a compulsion nerosis because
she could not impose moral restraint upon herself. Such people
must then have some other form of restraint-and along come the
compulsive symptoms to serve the purpose. Years ago I once drew
up statistics on the results of my treatments. I no longer recall the
figures exactly; but, on a conservative estimate, a third of my cases
were really cured, a third considerably improved, and a third not
essentially influenced. But it is precisely the unimproved cases
which are hardest to judge, because many things are not realized
and understood by the patients until years afterward, and only then
can they take effect. How often former patients have written to me: "I
did not realize what it was really all about until ten years after I had
been with you."

I have had a few cases who ran out on me; very rarely indeed have I
had to send a patient away. But even among them were some who
later sent me positive reports. That is why it is often so difficult to
draw conclusions as to the success of a treatment.

It is obvious that in the course of his practice a doctor will come
across people who have a great effect on him too. He meets
personalities who, for better or worse, never stir the interest of the
public and who nevertheless, or for that very reason, possess
unusual qualities, or whose destiny it is to pass through
unprecedented developments and disasters. Sometimes they are
persons of extraordinary talents, who might well inspire another to
give his life for them; but these talents may be implanted in so
strangely unfavorable a psychic disposition that we cannot tell
whether it is a question of genius or of fragmentary development.
Frequently, too, in this unlikely soil there flower rare blossoms of the

psyche which we would never have thought to find in the flatlands of
society. For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is
needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights
and depths of human suffering. The rapport consists, after all, in a
constant comparison find mutual comprehension, in the dialectical
confrontation of two opposing psychic realities. If for some reason
these mutual impressions do not impinge on each other, the
psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is
produced. Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to
each other, no solution is found.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many
who in other ages would not have been neurotic-that is, divided
against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in
which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors,
and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from
outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.
I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and
who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world
as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling
with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.

These victims of the psychic dichotomy of our time are merely
optional neurotics; their apparent morbidity drops away the moment
the gulf between the ego and the unconscious is closed. The doctor
who has felt this dichotomy to the depths of his being will also be
able to reach a better understanding of the unconscious psychic
processes, and will be saved from the danger of inflation to which
the psychologist is prone. The doctor who does not know from his
own experience the numinosity of the archetypes will scarcely be
able to escape their negative effect when he encounters it in his
practice. He will tend to over- or under-estimate it, since he
possesses only an intellectual point of view but no empirical
criterion. This is where those perilous aberrations begin, the first of

which is the attempt to dominate everything by the intellect. This
serves the secret purpose of placing both doctor and patient at a
safe distance from the archetypal effect and thus from real
experience, and of substituting for psychic reality an apparently
secure, artificial, but merely two-dimensional conceptual world in
which the reality of life is well covered up by so-called clear
concepts. Experience is stripped of its substance, and instead
mere names are substituted, which are henceforth put in the place
of reality. No one has any obligations to a concept; that is what is so
agreeable about conceptuality-it promises protection from
experience. The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and
in facts. Words butter no parsnips; nevertheless, this futile
procedure is repeated ad infinitum.

In my experience, therefore, the most difficult as well as the most
ungrateful patients, apart from habitual liars, are the so- called
intellectuals. With them, one hand never knows what the other hand
is doing. They cultivate a "compartment psychology." Anything can
be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling-
and yet the intellectual still suffers from a neurosis if feeling is
undeveloped.

From my encounters with patients and with the psychic phenomena
which they have paraded before me in an endless stream of
images, I have learned an enormous amount-not just knowledge,
but above all insight into my own nature. And not the least of what I
have learned has come from my errors and defeats. I have had
mainly women patients, who often entered into the work with
extraordinary conscientiousness, understanding, and intelligence. It
was essentially because of them that I was able to strike out on new
paths in therapy.

A number of my patients became my disciples in the original sense
of the word, and have carried my ideas out into the world. Among

them I have made friendships that have endured decade after
decade.

My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I
could not help learning essential things from them. Encounters with
people of so many different kinds and on so many different
psychological levels have been for me incomparably more
important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities. The
finest and most significant conversations of my life were
anonymous.

Sigmund Freud

I EMBARKED on the adventure of my intellectual development by
becoming a psychiatrist. In all innocence I began observing mental
patients, clinically, from the outside, and thereby came upon
psychic processes of a striking nature. I noted and classified these
things without the slightest understanding of their contents, which
were considered to be adequately evaluated when they were
dismissed as "pathological." In the course of time my interest
focused more and more, upon cases in which I experienced
something understandable-that is, cases of paranoia, manic-
depressive insanity, and psychogenic disturbances. From the start
of my psychiatric career the studies of Breuer and Freud, along with
the work of Pierre Janet, provided me with a wealth of suggestions
and stimuli. Above all, I found that Freud's technique of dream
analysis and dream interpretation cast a valuable light upon
schizophrenic forms of expression. As early as 1900 I had read
Freud's The Imrerpretation of Dreams?

1 This chapter should be regarded as a supplement to Jung's numerous
writings Freud. The most important of these are contained in Freud and
Psychoanalysis (CW 4). Cf. also "Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting"
(1934) and "Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1939), in The Spirit in Man, Art,
and Literature (CW 15). .

I had laid the book aside, at the time, because I did not yet grasp it.
At the age of twenty-five I lacked the experience to appreciate
Freud's theories. Such experience did not come until later. In 1 903 I
once more took up The Interpretation of Dreams and discovered

how it all linked up with my own ideas. What chiefly interested me
was the application to dreams of the concept of the repression
mechanism, which was derived from the psychology of the
neuroses. This was important to me because I had frequently
encountered repressions in my experiments with word association;
in response to certain stimulus words the patient either had no
associative answer or was unduly slow in his reaction time. As was
later discovered, such a disturbance occurred each time the
stimulus word had touched upon a psychic lesion or conflict. In most
cases the patient was unconscious of this. When questioned about
the cause of the disturbance, he would often answer in a peculiarly
artificial manner. My reading of Freud's The Interpretation of
Dreams showed me that the repression mechanism was at work
here, and that the facts I had observed were consonant with his
theory. Thus 1 was able to corroborate Freud's line of argument. The
situation was different when it came to the content of the
repression. Here I could not agree with Freud. He considered the
cause of the repression to be a sexual trauma. From my practice,
however, I was familiar with numerous cases of neurosis in which
the question of sexuality played a subordinate part, other factors
standing in the foreground-for example, the problem of social
adaptation, of oppression by tragic circumstances of life, prestige
considerations, and so on. Later I presented such cases to Freud;
but he would not grant that factors other than sexuality could be the
cause. That was highly unsatisfactory to me.

At the beginning it was not easy for me to assign Freud the proper
place in my life, or to take the right attitude toward him. When I
became acquainted with his work I was planning an

2 In his obituary on Freud (1939), Jung calls this work "epoch-making" and
probably the boldest attempt that has ever been made to master the riddles
of the unconscious psyche upon the apparently firm ground of empiricism.
For us, then young psychiatrists, it was... a source of illumination, while for

our older colleagues it was an object of mockery. "-A. J.

academic career, and was about to complete a paper that was
intended to advance me at the university. But Freud was definitely
persona non grata in the academic world at the time, and any
connection with him would have been damaging in scientific circles.
"Important people" at most mentioned him surreptitiously, and at
congresses he was discussed only in the corridors, never on the
floor. Therefore the discovery that my association experiments were
in agreement with Freud's theories was far from pleasant to me.

Once, while I was in my laboratory and reflecting again upon these
questions, the devil whispered to me that I would be justified in
publishing the results of my experiments and my conclusions
without mentioning Freud. After all, I had worked out my
experiments long before I understood his work. But then I heard the
voice of my second personality: "If you do a thing like that, as if you
had no knowledge of Freud, it would be a piece of trickery. You
cannot build your life upon a lie." With that, the question was settled.
From then on I became an open partisan of Freud's and fought for
him.

I first took up the cudgels for Freud at a congress in Munich where a
lecturer discussed obsessional neuroses but studiously forbore to
mention the name of Freud. In 1906, in connection with this incident,
I wrote a paper " for the Munchner Medizini- sche Woohenschrift on
Freud's theory of the neuroses, which I had contributed a great deal
to the understanding of obsessional neuroses. In response to this
article, two German professors wrote to me, warning that if I
remained on Freud's side and continued to defend him, I would be
endangering my academic career. I replied: "If what Freud says is
the truth, I am with him. I don't give a damn for a career if it has to be
based on the premise of restricting research and concealing the
truth." And I went on defending Freud and his ideas. But on the

basis of my own findings I was still unable to feel that all neuroses
were caused by sexual repression or sexual traumata. In certain

3 "Die Hysterielehre Freuds: Eine Erwiderung auf die Aschaffenburgsche
Kritik," Munehener medizinische Wocheewchrift, Llll (November, 1906), 47;
English trans.: "Freud's Theory of Hysteria: A Reply to Aschaffcnburg, in
Freud and Psychoanalysis ( CW 4).

cases that was so, but not in others. Nevertheless, Freud had
opened up a new path of investigation, and the shocked out- cries
against him at the time seemed to me absurd. [4]

I had not met with much sympathy for the ideas expressed in "The
Psychology of Dementia Praecox." In fact, my colleagues laughed
at me. But through this book I came to know Freud. He invited me to
visit him, and our first meeting took place in Vienna in March 1907.
We met at one o'clock in the afternoon and talked virtually without a
pause for thirteen hours. Freud was the first man of real importance
I had encountered; in my experience up to that time, no one else
could compare with him. There was nothing the least trivial in his
attitude. I found him extremely intelligent, shrewd, and altogether
remarkable. And yet my first impressions of him remained
somewhat tangled; I could not make him out.

What he said about his sexual theory impressed me. Nevertheless,
his words could not remove my hesitations and doubts. I tried to
advance these reservations of mine on several occasions, but each
time he would attribute them to my lack of experience.

Freud was right; in those days I had not enough experience to
support my objections. I could see that his sexual theory was
enormously important to him, both personally and philosophically.
This impressed me, but I could not decide to what extent this strong
emphasis upon sexuality was connected with subjective prejudices
of his, and to what extent it rested upon verifiable experiences.

Above all, Freud's attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly
questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an
expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the supernatural
sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was
repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted
as sexuality he referred to as "psychosexuality."

In 1906, after Jung sent Freud Diagnostische
Assoziatiorzsstudien (1 906; English trans, of Jung's contributions in
Experimental Researches, CW 2),

I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion,
would lead to an annihilating judgment upon culture. Culture would
then appear as a mere farce, the morbid consequence of
repressed sexuality. "Yes," he assented, "so it is, and that is just a
curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend." I was by
no means disposed to agree, Or to let it go at that, but still I did not
feel competent to argue it out with him.

There was something else that seemed to me significant at that first
meeting. It had to do with things which I was able to think out and
understand only after our friendship was over. There was no
mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual
theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone
became urgent, almost anxious, and all signs of his normally critical
and skeptical manner vanished. A strange, deeply moved
expression came over his face, the cause Of which I was at a loss
to understand. I had a strong intuition that for him sexuality was a
sort of numinosum. This was confirmed by a conversation which
took place some three years later (in, 1910), again in Vienna.

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung,
promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most

essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an
unshakable bulwark." He said that to me with great emotion, the
tone of a father saying, "And promise me this one thing, my dear
son: that you will go to church every Sunday." In some astonishment
I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" which he replied, "Against
the black tide of mud"-and here hesitated for a moment, then
added-"Of occultism." First of all, it was the words "bulwark" and
"dogma" that alarmed me; for a dogma, that is to say, an
undisputable confession of faith is set up only when the aim is to
suppress doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to
do with scientific judgment; only with a personal power drive.

This was the thing that struck at the heart of our friendship. I knew
that I would never be able to accept such an attitude. What Freud
seemed to mean by "Occultism" was virtually everything that
philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary science
of parapsychology, had learned about the psyche. To me the sexual
theory was just as occult, that is to say, just as unproven an
hypothesis, as many other speculative views. As I saw it, a scientific
truth was a hypothesis which might be adequate for the moment but
was not to be preserved as an article of faith for all time.

Although I did not properly understand it then, I had observed in
Freud the eruption of unconscious religious factors. Evidently he
wanted my aid in erecting a barrier against these threatening
unconscious contents. The impression this conversation made
upon me added to my confusion; until then I had not considered
sexuality as a precious and imperiled concept to which one must
remain faithful. Sexuality evidently meant more to Freud than to
other people. For him it was something to be religiously observed.
In the face of such deep convictions one generally becomes shy
and reticent. After a few stammering attempts on my part, the
conversation soon came to an end.

I was bewildered and embarrassed. I had the feeling that I had
caught a glimpse of a new, unknown country from which swarms of
new ideas flew to meet me. One thing was clear: Freud, who had
always made much of his irreligiosity had now constructed a
dogma; or rather, in the place of a jealous God whom he had lost,
he had substituted another compelling image, that of sexuality. It
was no less insistent, exacting, domineering, threatening, and
morally ambivalent than the original one. Just as the psychically
stronger agency is given "divine" or "daemonic" attributes, so the
"sexual libido" took over the role of a deus absconditus, a hidden or
concealed god. The advantage of this transformation for Freud
was, apparently, that he was able to regard the new numinous
principle as scientifically irreproachable and free from all religious
taint. At bottom, however, the numinosity, that is, the psychological
qualities of the two rationally incommensurable opposites-Yahweh
and sexuality-remained the same. The name alone had changed,
and with it, of course, the point of view: the lost god had now to be
sought below, not above. But what difference does it make,
ultimately, to the stronger agency if it is called now by one name
and now by another? If psychology did not exist, but only concrete
objects, the one would actually have been destroyed and replaced
by the other. But in reality, that is to say, in psychological
experience, there is not one whit the less of urgency, anxiety,
compulsiveness, etc. The problem still remains: how to overcome
or escape our anxiety, bad conscience, guilt, compulsion,
unconsciousness, and instinctuality If we cannot do this from the
bright, idealistic side, then perhaps we shall have better luck by
approaching the problem from the dark, biological side.

Like flames suddenly flaring up, these thoughts darted through my
mind. Much later, when I reflected upon Freud's character, they
revealed their significance. There was one characteristic of his that
preoccupied me above all: his bitterness. It had struck me at our

first encounter, but it remained inexplicable to me until I was able to
see it in connection with his attitude toward sexuality. Although, for
Freud, sexuality was undoubtedly a numinosum, his terminology
and theory seemed to define it exclusively as a biological function. It
was only the emotionality with which he spoke of it that revealed the
deeper elements reverberating within him. Basically, he wanted to
teach-or so at least it seemed to me-that, regarded from within,
sexuality included spirituality and had an intrinsic meaning. But his
concretistic terminology was too narrow to express this idea. He
gave me the impression that at bottom he was working against his
own goal and against himself; and there is, after all, no harsher
bitterness than that of a person who is his own worst enemy. In his
own words, he felt himself menaced by a "black tide of mud"-he
who more than anyone else had tried to let down his buckets into
those black depths.

Freud never asked himself why he was compelled to talk continually
of sex, why this idea had taken such possession of him. He
remained unaware that his "monotony of interpretation" expressed
a flight from himself, or from that other side of him which might
perhaps be called mystical. So long as he refused to acknowledge
that side, he could never be reconciled with himself. He was blind
toward the paradox and ambiguity of the contents of the
unconscious, and did not know that everything which arises out of
the unconscious has a top and a bottom, an inside and an outside.
When we speak of the outside-and that is what Freud did-we are
considering only half of the whole, with the result that a countereffect
arises out of the unconscious.

There was nothing to be done about this one-sidedness of Freud's.
Perhaps some inner experience of his own might have opened his
eyes; but then his intellect would have reduced any such experience
to "mere sexuality" or "psychosexuality." He remained the victim of
the one aspect he could recognize, and for that reason I see him as

a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in
the grip of his daimon.

After that second conversation in Vienna I also understood Alfred
Adler's power hypothesis, to which I had hitherto paid scant
attention. Like many sons, Adler had learned from his "father" not
what the father said, but what he did. Instantly, the problem of love
(Eros) and power came down upon me like a leaden weight. Freud
himself had told me that he had never read Nietzsche; now I saw
Freud's psychology as, so to speak, an adroit move on the part of
intellectual history, compensating for Nietzsche's deification of the
power principle. The problem had obviously to be rephrased not as
"Freud versus Adler" but "Freud versus Nietzsche." It was therefore,
I thought, more than a domestic quarrel in the domain of
psychopathology. The idea dawned on me that Eros and the power
drive might be in a sense like the dissident sons of a single father,
or the products of a single motivating psychic force which
manifested itself empirically in opposing forms, like positive and
negative electrical charges, Eros as a patiens, the power drive as
an agens, and vice versa. Eros makes just as great demands upon
the power drive as the latter upon the former. Where is the one
drive without the other? On the one hand man succumbs to the
drive; on the other hand, he tries to master it. Freud shows how the
object succumbs to the drive, and Adler how man uses the drive in
order to force his will upon the object. Nietzsche, helpless in the
hands of his destiny, had to create a "superman" for himself. Freud,
I concluded, must himself be so profoundly affected by the power of
Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma-aere
perenni us-like a religious numen. It is no secret that "Zarathustra"
is the proclaimer of a gospel, and here was Freud also trying to
outdo the church and to canonize a theory. To be sure, he did not
do this too loudly; instead, he suspected me of wanting to be a
prophet. He made his tragic claim and demolished it at the same

time; That is how people usually behave with numinosities, and
rightly so, for in one respect they are true, in another untrue.
Numinous experience elevates and humiliates simultaneously; If
Freud had given somewhat more consideration to the
psychological truth that sexuality is numinous-both a god and devil-
-he would not have remained bound within the confines of a
biological concept. And Nietzsche might not have been carried over
the brink of the world by his intellectual excesses if he had only held
more firmly to the foundations of human existence.

Wherever the psyche is set violently oscillating by a numinous
experience, there is a danger that the thread by which one hangs
may be torn. Should that happen, one man tumbles into an absolute
affirmation, another into an equally absolute negation. Nirdvandva
(freedom from opposites) is the Orient's remedy for this. I have not
forgotten that. The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense
and nonsense, not between right an wrong. The numinosum is
dangerous because it lures men extremes, so that a modest truth is
regarded as the truth and a minor mistake is equated with fatal
error. Tout passe-yesterday's truth is today's deception, and
yesterday's false inference may be tomorrow's revelation. This is
particularly so in pschological matters, of which, if truth were told,
we still know very little. We are still a long way from understanding
what signifies that nothing has any existence unless some small-
and oh, so transitory-consciousness has become aware of it.

My conversation with Freud had shown me that he feared that the
numinous light of his sexual insights might be extinguished by a
"black tide of mud." Thus a mythological situation had arisen: the
struggle between light and darkness. That explains its numinosity,
and why Freud immediately fell back on his dogma as a religious
means of defense. In my next book, Wandungen und Symbole der
Libido, [5] which dealt with the hero's struggle for freedom, Freud's
curious reaction prompted me to investigate further this archetypal

theme and its mythological background.

What with the sexual interpretation on the one hand and the power
drive of dogma on the other I was led, over the years, to give
consideration of the problem of typology. It was necessary to study
the polarity and dynamics of the psyche. And I also embarked upon
an investigation extending over several decades of "the black tide
of mud of occultism"~that is to say, I tried to understand the
conscious and unconscious historical assumptions underlying our
contemporary psychology.

It interested me to hear Freud's views on precognition and on
parapsychology in general. When I visited him in Vienna in 1909 I
asked him what he thought of these matters. Because of his
materialistic prejudice, he rejected this entire complex of questions
as nonsensical, and did so in terms of so shallow a positivism that I
had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue. It
was some years before he recognized the seriousness of
parapsychology and acknowledged the factuality of "occult"
phenomena.

While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It
was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming
red-hot-a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud
report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both
started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us.
I said to Freud: "There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic
exteriorization phenomenon.

"Oh come," he exclaimed. "That is sheer bosh."

"It is not," I replied. "You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove
my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another such
loud report!" Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the

same detonation went off in the bookcase,

5 Published in 1912; English trans.; Psychology of the Unconscious (1917).
Revedn., Symbole der Wandlung (1952); English trans.: Symbols of
Transformation (CW 5. 1956)

To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew
beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only
stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his
look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his mistrust of me,
and I had the feeling that I had done something against him. I never
afterward discussed the incident with him. [6]

The year 1909 proved decisive for our relationship. I had been
invited to lecture on the association experiment at Clark University
in Worcester, Massachusetts. Independently, Freud had also
received an invitation, and we decided to travel together. We met in
Bremen, where Ferenczi joined us. In Bremen the much-discussed
incident of Freud's fainting fit occurred. It was provoked-indirectly-
by my interest in the "peat-bog corpses." I knew that in certain
districts of Northern Germany; these so-called bog corpses were to
be found. They are the bodies of prehistoric men who either
drowned in the marshes or were buried there. The bog water in
which the bodies lie contains humic acid, which consumes the
bones and simultaneously tans the skin, so that it and the hair are
perfectly preserved. In essence this is a process of natural
mummification, in the course of which the bodies are pressed flat
by the weight of the peat. Such remains are occasionally turned up
by peat diggers in Holstein, Denmark, and Sweden.

Having read about these peat-bog corpses, I recalled them when
we were in Bremen, but, being a bit muddled, confused them with
the mummies in the lead cellars of the city. This interest of mine got
on Freud's nerves. "Why are you so concerned with these

corpses?" he asked me several times. He was inordinately vexed
by the whole thing and during one such conversation, while we were
having dinner together, he sudden fainted. Afterward he said to me
that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant I
had death-wishes toward him. I was more than surprised by this
interpretation. I was alarmed by the intensity of his fantasies-so
strong that, obviously, they could cause him to faint.

In a similar connection Freud once more suffered a fainting

6 For Freud's reaction to the incident, see Appendix I, pp. 361-63.

7 See Appendix II, pp. 365-68.

fit in my presence. This was during the Psychoanalytic Congress in
Munich in 1912. Someone had turned the conversation to
Amenophis IV (Ikhnaton). The point was made that as a result of his
negative attitude toward his father he had destroyed his father's
cartouches on the steles, and that at the back of his great creation
of a monotheistic religion there lurked a father complex. This sort of
thing irritated me, and I attempted to argue that Amenophis had
been a creative and profoundly religious person whose acts could
not be explained by personal resistances toward his father. On the
contrary, I said, he had held the memory of his father in honor, and
his zeal for destruction had been directed only against the name of
the god Amon, which he had everywhere annihilated; it was also
chiseled out of the cartouches of his father Amon-hotep. Moreover,
other pharaohs had replaced the names of their actual or divine
forefathers on monuments and statues by their own, feeling that they
had a right to do so since they were incarnations of the same god.
Yet they, I pointed out, had inaugurated neither a new style nor a
new religion.

At that moment Freud slid off his chair in a faint. Everyone clustered
helplessly around him. I picked him up, carried him into the next

room, and laid him on a sofa. As I was carrying him, he half came
to, and I shall never forget the look he cast at me. In his weakness
he looked at me as if I were his father. Whatever other causes may
have contributed to this faint-the atmosphere was very tense-the
fantasy of father-murder was common to both cases.

At the time Freud frequently made allusions indicating that he
regarded me as his successor. These hints were embarrassing to
me, for I knew that I would never be able to uphold his views
properly, that is to say, as he intended them. On the other hand I
had not yet succeeded in working out my criticisms in such a
manner that they would carry any weight with him, and my respect
for him was too great for me to want to force him to come finally to
grips with my own ideas.-l was by no means charmed by the
thought of being burdened, virtually over my own head, with the
leadership of a party. In the first place that sort of thing was not in
my nature; in the second place I could not sacrifice my intellectual
independence; and in the third place such luster was highly
unwelcome to me since it would only deflect me from my real aims. I
was concerned with investigating truth, not with questions of
personal prestige.

The trip to the United States which began in Bremen in 1909 lasted
for seven weeks. We were together every day, and analyzed each
other's dreams. At the time I had a number of important ones, but
Freud could make nothing of them. I did not regard that as any
reflection upon him, for it sometimes happens to the best analyst
that he is unable to unlock the riddle of a dream. It was a human
failure, and I would never have wanted to discontinue our dream
analyses on that account. On the contrary, they meant a great deal
to me, and I found our relationship exceedingly valuable. I regarded
Freud as an older, more mature and experienced personality, and
felt like a son in that respect. But then something happened which
proved to be a severe blow to the whole relationship.

Freud had a dream-l would not think it right to air the problem it
involved. I interpreted it as best I could, but added that a great deal
more could be said about it if he would supply me with some
additional details from his private life. Freud's response to these
words was a curious look-a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he
said, "But I cannot risk my authority!" At that moment he lost it
altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the
end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was
placing personal authority above truth.

As I have already said, Freud was able to interpret the dreams I
was then having only incompletely or not at all. They were dreams
with collective contents, containing, a great deal of symbolic
material. One in particular was important to me, for it led me for the
first time to the concept of the "collective unconscious" and thus
formed a kind of prelude to my book, Wendlungen and Symbole der
Libido.[8]

This was the dream. I was in a house I did not know, which had two
stories. It was "my house." I found myself in the upper

8 Psychology of the Unconscious; rev edn.: Symbols of Transformation
(CW 5).

story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old Pieces
in rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old
paintings. I wondered that this should be my house, and thought,
"Not bad." But then it occtured to me that I did not know what the
lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground
floor. There everything was much older, and I realized that this part
of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick.
Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another,

thinking, "Now I really must explore the whole house." I came upon a
heavy door, and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway
that led down into the cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a
beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient.
Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the
ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I
saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest
by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of
stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled
it, the stone slab lifted, and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone
steps leading down into the depths. These, too, I descended, and
entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay on the floor, and
in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains
of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very
old and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.

What chiefly interested Freud in this dream were the two skulls. He
returned to them repeatedly, and urged me to find a wish in
connection with them. What did I think about these skulls? And
whose were they? I knew perfectly well, of course, what he was
driving at: that secret death-wishes were concealed in the dream.
"But what does he really expect of me?" 1 thought to myself. Toward
whom would I have death wishes? I felt violent resistance to any
such interpretation. I also had some intimation of what the dream
might really mean. But 1 did not then trust my own judgment, and
wanted to hear Freud's opinion. I wanted to learn from him.
Therefore I submitted to his intention and said, "My wife and my
sister-in-law" -after all, I had to name someone whose death was
worth the wishing!

I was newly married at the time and knew perfectly well that there
was nothing within myself which pointed to such wishes. But I would
not have been able to present to Freud my own ideas on an
interpretation of the dream without encountering incomprehension

and vehement resistance. I did not feel up to quarreling with him,
and I also feared that I might lose friendship if I insisted on my own
point of view. On the other, hand, I wanted to know what he would
make of my answer, and what his reaction would be if I deceived
him by saying something that suited his theories. And so I told him a
lie.

I was quite aware that my conduct was not above reproach, but a la
guerre, comme a la guerre! It would have been impossible for me to
afford him any insight into my mental world. The gulf between it and
his was too great. In fact Freud seemed greatly relieved by my
reply. I saw from this that he was completely helpless in dealing with
certain kinds of dreams and had to take refuge in his doctrine. I
realized that it was up to me to find out the real meaning of the
dream.

It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the
psyche-that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with
hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by
the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated
style.

The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The
deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene came. In the
cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of
the primitive man within myself-a world which can scarcely be
reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of
man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of
prehistoric times were usually inhabit by animals before men laid
claim to them.

During this period I became aware of how keenly I felt the difference
between Freud's intellectual attitude and mine. I had grown up in the
intensely historical atmosphere of Basel at the end of the nineteenth

century, and had acquired, thanks reading the old philosophers,
some knowledge of the history of Psychology. When I thought about
dreams and the contents of the unconscious, 1 never did so without
making historical comparisons; in my student days I always used
Krug'sold dictionary of philosophy. I was especially familiar with the
writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Theirs was
the world which had formed the atmosphere of my first-story salon.
By contrast, I had the impression that Freud's intellectual history
began with Buchner, Moleschott, Du Bois-Reymond, and Darwin.

The dream pointed out that there were further reaches to the state
of consciousness I have just described: the long uninhabited ground
floor in medieval style, then the Roman cellar, and finally the
prehistoric cave. These signified past times and passed stages of
consciousness.

Certain questions had been much on my mind during the days
preceding this dream. They were: On what premises is Freudian
psychology founded? To what category of human thought does it
belong? What is the relationship of its almost exclusive personalism
to general historical assumptions? My dream was giving me the
answer. It obviously pointed to the foundations of cultural history-a
history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream thus
constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it
postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying
that psyche. It "clicked," as the English have it-and the dream
became for me a guiding image which in the days to come was to
be corroborated to an extent I could not at first suspect. It was my
first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. This
I first took to be the traces of earlier modes of functioning. Later,
with increasing experience and on the basis of more reliable
knowledge, I recognized them as forms of instinct, that is, as
archetypes.

I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a "facade"
behind which its meaning lies hidden-a meaning already known but
maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me
dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intentian to deceive,
but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an
animal seeks its food as best it can. These forms of life, too, have
no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves
because our eyes are shortsighted. Or we hear amiss because our
ears are rather deaf-but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us.
Long before I met Freud I regarded the unconscious, and dreams,
which are its direct exponents, as natural processes to which no
arbitrariness can be attributed and above all no legerdemain. I
knew no reasons for the assumption that the tricks of
consciousness can be extended to the natural processes of the
unconscious. On the contrary, daily experience taught me what
intense resistance the unconscious experience opposes to the
tendencies of the conscious mind.

The dream of the house had a curious effect upon me: it revived my
old interest in archaeology. After I had returned to Zurich I took up a
book on Babylonian excavations, and read various works on myths.
In the course of this reading I came across Friedrich Creuzer's
Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker[9]-and that fired me. I
read like mad, and worked with feverish interest through a mountain
of mythological material then through the Gnostic writers, and
ended in total confusion. I found myself in a state of perplexity
similar to the one I had experienced at the clinic when I tried to
understand the meaning of psychotic states of mind. It was as if I
were in an imaginary madhouse and were beginning to treat and
analyze all the centaurs, nymphs, gods, and goddesses in
Creuzer's book as though they were my patients. While thus
occupied I could not help but discover the close relationship
between ancient mythology and the psychology of primitives, and

this led me to an intensive study of the latter.

In the midst of these studies I came upon the fantasies of a young
American altogether unknown to me, Miss Miller. The material had
been published by my revered and fatherly friend, Theodore
Flournoy in the Archives de Psychologie (Geneva- I was
immediately struck by the mythological character of the fantasies.

9 The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples (Leipzig and
Darmstadt, 1810-23).

They operated like a catalyst upon the stored-up and still disorderly
ideas within me. Gradually, there formed out of them, and out of the
knowledge of myths I had acquired, my book Wandlungen und
Symboleder Libido.

While I was working on this book, I had dreams which presaged the
forthcoming break with Freud. One of the most significant had its
scene in a mountainous region on the Swiss-Austrian border. It was
toward evening, and I saw an elderly man in the uniform of an
Imperial Austrian customs official. He walked past, somewhat
stooped, without paying any attention to me. His expression was
peevish, rather melancholic and vexed. There were other persons
present, and someone informed me that the old man was not really
there, but was the ghost of a customs official who had died years
ago. "He is one of those who still couldn't die properly." That was
the first part of the dream.

I set about analyzing this dream. In connection with "customs" I at
once thought of the word "censorship." In connection with "border" I
thought of the border between consciousness and the unconscious
on the one hand, and between Freud's views and mine on the other.
The extremely rigorous customs examination at the border seemed
to me an allusion to analysis. At a border suitcases are opened and

examined for contraband. In the course of this examination,
unconscious assumptions are discovered. As for the old customs
official, his work had obviously brought him so little that was
pleasurable and satisfactory that he took a sour view of the world. I
could not refuse to see the analogy with Freud.

At that time Freud had lost much of his authority for me. But he still
meant to me a superior personality, upon whom I projected the
father, and at the time of the dream this projection was still far from
eliminated. Where such a projection occurs, we are no longer
objective; we persist in a state of divided judgment. On the one
hand we are dependent, and on the other we have resistances.
When the dream took place I still thought highly of Freud, but at the
same time I was critical of him. This divided attitude is a sign that I
was still unconscious of the situation and had not come to any
resolution of it. This characteristic of all projections. The dream
urged upon me the necessity of clarifying this situation.

Under the impress of Freud's personality I had, as far as possible,
cast aside my own judgments and repressed my criticisms. That
was the prerequisite for collaborating with him. I had told myself,
"Freud is far wiser and more experienced than you. For the present
you must simply listen to what he says and learn from him. And then,
to my own surprise, I found myself dreaming of him as a peevish
official of the Imperial Austrian monarchy, as a defunct and still
walking ghost of a custom inspector. Could that be the death-wish
which Freud had insinuated I felt toward him? I could find no part of
myself that normally might have had such a wish, for I wanted at all
costs to be able to work with Freud, and, in a frankly egotistic
manner, to partake of his wealth of experience. His friendship
meant a great deal to me. I had no reason for wishing him dead.
But it was possible that the dream could be regarded as a
corrective, as a compensation or antidote for my conscious high
opinion and admiration. Therefore the dream recommended a

rather more critical attitude toward Freud. I was distinctly shocked
by it, although the final sentence of the dream seemed to me an
allusion to Freud's potential immortality.

The dream had not reached its end with the episode the customs
official; after a hiatus came a second and far more remarkable part.
I was in an Italian city, and it was around noon, between twelve and
one o'clock. A fierce sun was beating down upon the narrow
streets. The city was built on hills and reminded me of a particular
part of Basel, the Kohlenberg. The little streets which lead down into
the valley, the Birsigtal, that runs through the city, are partly flights of
steps. In the dream one such stairway descended to Barfusserplatz.
The city was Basel, and yet it was also an Italian city, something like
Bergamo. It was summertime; the blazing sun stood at the zenith,
and everything was bathed in an intense light. A crowd came
streaming toward me, and I knew that the shops were closing and
people were on their way home to dinner. In the midst of this stream
of people walked a knight in full armor. He mounted the steps
toward me. He wore a helmet of the kind that is called a basinet,
with eye slits, and chain armor. Over this was a white tunic into
which was woven, front and back, a large red cross.

One can easily imagine how I felt: suddenly to see in a modern city,
during the noonday rush hour, a crusader coming toward me. What
struck me as particularly odd was that none of the many persons
walking about seemed to notice him. No one turned his head or
gazed after him. It was as though he were completely invisible to
everyone but me. I asked myself what this apparition meant, and
then it was as if someone answered me-but there was no one
there to speak: "Yes, this is a regular apparition. The knight always
passes by here between twelve and one o'clock, and has been
doing so for a very long time [for centuries, I gathered] and
everyone knows about it."

The knight and the customs oflicial were contrasting figures. The
customs official was shadowy, someone who "still couldn't die
properly" -a fading apparition. The knight, on the other hand, was
full of life and completely real. The second part of the dream was
numinous in the extreme, whereas the scene on the border had
been prosaic and in itself not impressive; I had been struck only by
my reflections upon it.

In the period following these dreams I did a great deal of thinking
about the mysterious figure of the knight. But it was only much later,
after I had been meditating on the dream for a long time, that I was
able to get some idea of its meaning. Even in the dream, I knew
that the knight belonged to the twelfth century. That was the period
when alchemy was beginning and also the quest for the Holy Grail.
The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest importance to me
ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the first time. I had
an inkling that a great secret still lay hidden behind those stories.
Therefore it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should
conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest-for
that was, in the deepest sense, my own world, which had scarcely
anything to do with Freud's. My whole being was seeking for
something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the
banality of life.

To me it was a profound disappointment that all the efforts of the
probing mind had apparently succeeded in finding nothing more in
the depths of the psyche than the all too familiar and "all-too-human"
limitations. I had grown up in the country, among peasants, and
what I was unable to learn in the stables I found out from the
Rabelaisian wit and the untrammeled fantasies of our peasant
folklore. Incest and perversions were no remarkable novelties to
me, and did not call for any special explanation. Along with
criminality, they formed part of the black lees that spoiled the taste
of life by showing me only too plainly the ugliness and

meaninglessness of human existence. That cabbages thrive in
dung was something I had always taken for granted. In all honesty I
could discover no helpful insight in such knowledge. "It's just that all
of those people are city folks who know nothing about nature and
the human stable," I thought, sick and tired of these ugly matters.

People who know nothing about nature are of course neurotic, for
they are not adapted to reality. They are too naive like children, and
it is necessary to tell them the facts of life, so to speak-to make it
plain to them that they are human beings like all others. Not that
such enlightenment will cure neurotics; they can only regain their
health when they climb up out the mud of the commonplace. But
they are only too fond of lingering in what they have earlier
repressed. How are they ever to emerge if analysis does not make
them aware of something different and better, when even theory
holds them fast in it and offers them nothing more than the rational
or "reasonable injunction to abandon such childishness? That is
precisely what they cannot do, and how should they be able to if
they do not discover something to stand on? One form of life cannot
simply be abandoned unless it is exchanged for another. As for a
rational approach to life, that is, as experience shows, impossable,
especially when a person is by nature as unreasonable as a
neurotic.

I now realized why Freud's personal psychology was of such
burning interest to me. I was eager to know the truth about a
"reasonable solution," and I was prepared to sacrifice a good deal
in order to obtain the answer. Now I felt that I was on the track of it.
Freud himself had a neurosis, no doubt diagnosable and one with
highly troublesome symptoms, as I had discovered on our voyage
to America. Of course he had taught me that everybody is
somewhat neurotic, and that we must practice tolerance. But I was
not at all inclined to content myself with that; rather, I wanted to know
how one could escape having a neurosis. Apparently neither Freud

nor his disciples could understand what it meant for the theory and
practice of psychoanalysis if not even the master could deal with his
own neurosis. When, then, Freud announced his intention of
identifying theory and method and making them into some kind of
dogma, I could no longer collaborate with him; there remained no
choice for me but to withdraw.

When I was working on my book about the libido and approaching
the end of the chapter "The Sacrifce," I knew in advance that its
publication would cost me my friendship with Freud. For I planned
to set down in it my own conception of incest, the decisive
transformation of the concept of libido, and various other ideas in
which I differed from Freud. To me incest signified a personal
complication only in the rarest cases. Usually incest has a highly
religious aspect, for which reason the incest theme plays a decisive
part in almost all cosmogonies and in numerous myths. But Freud
clung to the literal interpretation of it and could not grasp the
spiritual significance of incest as a symbol. I knew that he would
never be able to accept any of my ideas on this subject.

I spoke with my wife about this, and told her of my fears. She
attempted to reassure me, for she thought that Freud would
magnanimously raise no objections, although he might not accept
my views. I myself was convinced that he could not do so. For two
months I was unable to touch my pen, so tormented was I by the
conflict. Should I keep my thoughts to myself, or should I risk the
loss of so important a friendship? At last I resolved to go ahead with
the writing-and it did indeed cost me Freud's friendship.

After the break with Freud, all my friends and acquaintances
dropped away. My book was declared to be rubbish; I was a
mystic, and that settled the matter. Riklin and Maeder alone stuck
by me. But I had foreseen my isolation and harbored no illusion
about the reactions of my so-called friends. That was a point I had

thoroughly considered beforehand. I had known that everything was
at stake, and that I had to take a stand for my convictions. I realized
that the chapter, "The Sacrifice,"* meant my own sacrifice. Having
reached this insight, I was able to write again, even though I knew
that my ideas would go uncomprehended.

In retrospect I can say that I alone logically pursued the two
problems which most interested Freud: the problem of "archaic
vestiges," and that of sexuality. It is a widespread error to imagine
that I do not see the value of sexuality. On the contrary, it plays a
large part in my psychology as an essential-though not the sole-
expression of psychic wholeness. But my main concern has been to
investigate, over and above its personal significance and biological
function, its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning, and thus to
explain what Freud was so fascinated by but was unable to grasp.
My thoughts on this subject are contained in "The Psychology of the
Transference" and the Mysterium Coniunctionis.[11] Sexuality is of
the greatest importance as the expression of the chthonic spirit.
That spirit is the "other face of God," the dark side of the God-
image. The question of the chthonic spirit has occupied me ever
since I began to delve into the world of alchemy. Basically, this
interest was awakened by that early conversation with Freud, when
mystified, I felt how deeply stirred he was by the phenomenon of
sexuality.

Freud's greatest achievement probably consisted in neurotic
patients seriously and entering into their peculiar individual
psychology. He had the courage to let the case material speak for
itself, and in this way was able to penetrate into the real psychology
of his patients. He saw with the patient's eyes so to speak, and so
reached a deeper understanding of mental illness than had hitherto
been possible. In this respect he was free of bias, courageous, and
succeeded in overcoming a host of prejudices.

10 In The Practice of Psychotherapy; (CW 16).
11CW14.

Like an Old Testament prophet, he undertook to overthrow false
gods, to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonesties and
hypocrisies, mercilessly exposing the rottenness of the
contemporary psyche. He did not falter in the face of the
unpopularity such an enterprise entailed. The impetus which he
gave to our civilization sprang from his discovery of an avenue to
the unconscious. By evaluating dreams as the most important
source of information concerning the unconscious processes, he
gave back to mankind a tool that had seemed irretrievably lost. He
demonstrated empirically the presence of an unconscious psyche
which had hitherto existed only as a philosophical postulate, in
particular in the philosophies of C. G. Cams and Eduard von
Hartmann.

It may well be said that the contemporary cultural consciousness
has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the
unconscious and all that it means, despite the fact that modern man
has been confronted with this idea for more than half a century. The
assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two
poles still remains a task for the future.

VI

Confrontation with the
Unconscious

After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner
uncertainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a
state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had
not yet found my own footing. Above all, I felt it necessary to develop
a new attitude toward my patients. I resolved for the present not to
bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and
see what they would tell of their own accord. My aim became to
leave things to chance. The result was that the patients would
spontaneously report their dreams and fantasies to me, and I would
merely ask, "What occurs to you in connection with that?" or, "How
do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think
about it?" The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord
from the patients' replies and associations. I avoided all theoretical
points of view and simply helped the patients to understand the
dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and
theories.

Soon I realized that it was right to take the dreams in this way as the
basis of interpretation, for that is how dreams are intended. They
are the facts from which we must proceed. Naturally, the aspects
resulting from this method were so multitudinous that the need for a
criterion grew more and more pressing-the need, I might almost
put it, for some initial orientation.

About this time I experienced a moment of unusual clarity in which I
looked back over the way I had traveled so far. I thought, "Now you
possess a key to mythology and are free to unlock all the gates of
the unconscious psyche." But then something whispered within me,
"Why open all gatesl'" And promptly the question arose of what,
after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples
of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which
man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays? In
the Christian myth, the answer might be, "Do you live in it?" I asked
myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I live
by." "Then do we no longer have any myth?" "No, evidently we no
longer have any myth." "But then what is your myth-the myth in
which you do live?" At this point the dialogue with myself became
uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a dead end.

Then, around Christmas of 1912, I had a dream. In the dream I
found myself in a magnificent Italian loggia with pillars, a marble
floor, and a marble balustrade. I was sitting on a gold Renaissance
chair; in front of me was a table of rare beauty. It was made of
green stone, like emerald. There I sat, looking out into the distance,
for the loggia was set high up on the tower of a castle. My children
were sitting at the table too.

Suddenly a white bird descended, a small sea gull or a dove.
Gracefully, it came to rest on the table, and I signed to the children
to be still so that they would not frighten away the pretty white bird.
Immediately, the dove was transformed into a little girl, about eight
years of age, with golden blond hair. She ran off with the children
and played with them among the colonnades of the castle.

I remained lost in thought, musing about what I had just
experienced. The little girl returned and tenderly placed her arms
around my neck. Then she suddenly vanished; the dove was back
and spoke slowly in a human voice. "Only in the first hours of the

night can I transform myself into a human being; while the male
dove is busy with the twelve dead." Then she flew off into the blue
air, and I awoke.

I was greatly stirred. What business would a male dove having with
twelve dead people? In connection with the emerald table the story
of the Tabula Smaragdina occurred to the emerald table in the
alchemical legend of Hermes Trismegistos. He was said to have
left behind him a table upon which the basic tenets of alchemical
wisdom were engraved in Greek.

I also thought of the twelve apostles, the twelve months the year, the
signs of the zodiac, etc. But I could find no solution to the enigma.
Finally I had to give it up. All I knew with any certainty was that the
dream indicated an unusual activation of the unconscious. But I
knew no technique whereby I might get to the bottom of my inner
processes, and so there remained nothing for me to do but wait, go
on with my life, and pay close attention to my fantasies.

One fantasy kept returning: there was something dead present, but
it was also still alive. For example, corpses were placed in
crematory ovens, but were then discovered to be still living. These
fantasies came to a head and were simultaneously solved in a
dream.

I was in a region like the Alyscamps near Aries. There they have a
lane of sarcophagi which go back to Merovingian times. In the
dream I was coming from the city, and saw before me a similar lane
with a long row of tombs. They were pedestals with stone slabs on
which the dead lay. They reminded me of old church burial vaults,
where knights in armor lie out- stretched. Thus the dead lay in my
dream, in their antique clothes, with hands clasped, the difference
being that they were not hewn out of stone, but in a curious fashion
mummified. I stood still in front of the first grave and looked at the

dead in who was a person of the eighteen-thirties. I looked at his
clothing with interest, whereupon he suddenly moved and came to
life. He unclasped his hands; but that was only because I was
looking at him. I had an extremely unpleasant feeling, but walked on
and came to another body. He belonged to the eighteenth century.
There exactly the same thing happened: when I looked at him, he
came to life and moved his hands. So I went down the whole row,
until I came to the twelfth century-that is, to a crusader in chain mail
who lay there with clasped hands. His figure seemed carved out of
wood. For a long time I looked at him and thought he was really
dead. But suddenly I saw that a finger of his left hand was beginning
to stir gently.

Of course I had originally held to Freud's view that vestiges of old
experiences exist in the unconscious. But dreams like this, and my
actual experiences of the unconscious, taught me that such
contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living
being. My work had confirmed this assumption, and in the course of
years there developed from it the theory of archetypes.

The dreams, however, could not help me over my feeling of
disorientation. On the contrary, I lived as if under constant inner
pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there
was some psychic disturbance in myself. Therefore I twice went
over all the details of my entire life, with particular attention to
childhood memories; for I thought there might be something in my
past which I could not see and which might possibly be the cause of
the disturbance. But this retrospection led to nothing but a fresh
acknowledgment of my own ignorance. Thereupon I said to myself,
"Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to
me." Thus I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the
unconscious.

The first thing that came to the surface was a childhood memory

from perhaps my tenth or eleventh year. At that time I had had a
spell of playing passionately with building blocks. I distinctly recalled
how I had built little houses and castles, using bottles to form the
sides of gates and vaults. Somewhat later I had used ordinary
stones, with mud for mortar. These structures had fascinated me for
a long time. To my astonishment, this memory was accompanied
by a good deal of emotion. "Aha," I

1 Freud speaks of "archaic \estiges."

said to myself, "there is still life in these things. The small boy is still
around, and possesses a creative life which I lack. But how can I
make my way to it?" For as a grown man it seemed impossible to
me that I should be able to bridge the distance from the present
back to my eleventh year. Yet if I wanted to re-establish contact with
that period, I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more
that child's life with his childish games. This moment was a turning
point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistances and with
a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience
to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish
games. Nevertheless, I began accumulating suitable stones,
gathering them partly from the lake shore and partly from the water.

And I started building: cottages, a castle, a whole village. The
church was still missing, so I made a square building with a
hexagonal drum on top of it, and a dome. A church also requires an
altar, but I hesitated to build that.

Preoccupied with the question of how I could approach this task, I
was walking along the lake as usual one day, picking stones out of
the gravel on the shore. Suddenly I caught sight of a red stone, a
four-sided pyramid about an inch and a half high. It was a fragment
of stone which had been polished into this shape by the action of
the water-a pure product of chance. I knew at once: this was the

altar. I placed it in the middle under the dome, and as I did so, I
recalled the underground phallus of my childhood dream. This
connection gave me a feeling of satisfaction.

I went on with my building game after the noon meal every day,
whenever the weather permitted. As soon as I was through eating, I
began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and
if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went
back to building. In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified,
and I was able to grasp the fantasies whose presence in myself I
dimly felt.

Naturally, I thought about the significance of what I was doing, and
asked myself, "Now, really, what are you about? You are building a
small town, and doing it as if it were a rite!" I had no answer to my
question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to
discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a
beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully
wrote down.

This sort of thing has been consistent with me, and at any time in
my later life when I came up against a blank wall, I painted a picture
or hewed stone. Each such experience proved to be a rite d'entree
for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it it. Everything that I
have written this year " and last year, "The Undiscovered Self,"
"Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth," "A Psychological View of
Conscience," has grown out of the the sculptures I did after my
wife's death? The close of her life, the end, and what it made me
realize, wrenched me violently out of myself. It cost me a great deal
to regain my footing and contact with stone helped me.

Toward the autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me
seemed to be moving outward, as though there were something in
the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had

been. It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang
exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This
feeling grew more and more intense.

In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by
an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the
northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps.
When it came up to Switzerland I saw that in the mountains grew
higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful
catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the
floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted
thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted
about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of
my weakness.

Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same
conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was
emphasized. An inner voice spoke. "Look at it well; it is wholly real
and it will be so. You cannot doubt it." That winter someone asked
me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the
near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I
saw rivers of blood.

I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but
could not really imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the
conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I
was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me
at all.

Soon afterward, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a
thrice-repeated dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold
wave descended and froze the land to ice. I saw, for example, the
whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally
deserted by human beings. All living green things were killed by

frost. This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in
June, 1914.

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the
cosmos. This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There
stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought),
whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into
sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave
them to a large, waiting crowd.

At the end of July 1914 I was invited by the British Medical
Association to deliver a lecture, "On the Importance of the
Unconscious in Psychopathology? at a congress in Aberdeen. I
was prepared for something to happen, for such visions and
dreams are fateful. In my state of mind just then, with the fears-that
were pursuing me, it seemed fateful to me that I should have to talk
on the importance of the unconscious at such a time!

On August 1 the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had
to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own
experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my
first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche. I made a
beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to me
during my building game. This work took precedence over
everything else.

An incessant stream of fantasies had been released, and I did my
best not to lose my head but to f nd some way to understand these
strange things. I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in
it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant
state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were
tumbling down upon me. One thunderstorm followed another. My
enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others
have been shattered by them-Nietzsche, and Holderlin, and many

others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the
beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the
meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. When I
endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving
conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling
continued to uphold me til I had mastered the task.

I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga
exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was
my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do
these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my
work with the unconscious. As soon as I had the feeling that I was
myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and
allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh. The Indian,
on the other hand, does yoga exercises in order to obliterate
completely the multitude of psychic contents and images.

To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images-
that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the
emotions-l was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those
images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by
them. There is a chance that I might have succeded in splitting them
off; but in that case I would inexorably have fallen into a neurosis
and so been ultimately destroyed by them anyhow. As a result of my
experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic
point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind
emotions.

I wrote down the fantasies as well as I could, and made an earnest
effort to analyze the psychic conditions under which they had arisen.
But I was able to do this only in clumsy language. First I formulated
the things as I had observed them, usually in "high-flown language,"
for that corresponds to the style of the archetypes. Archetypes
speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast. It is a style I

find embarrassing; it grates on my nerves, as when someone draws
his nails down a plaster wall, or scrapes his knife against a plate.
But since I did not know what was going on, I had no choice but to
write everything down in the style selected by the unconscious itself.
Sometimes it was as if I were hearing it with my ears, sometimes
feeling it with my mouth, as if my tongue were formulating words;
now and then I heard myself whispering aloud. Below the threshold
of consciousness everything was seething with life.

From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with
the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was
conducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. Today I
might equally well say that it was an experiment which was being
conducted on me. One of the greatest difficulties for me lay in
dealing with my negative feelings. I was voluntarily submitting myself
to emotions of which I could not really approve, and I was writing
down fantasies which often struck me as nonsense, and toward
which I had strong resistances. For as long as we do not
understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of
the sublime and the ridiculous. It cost me a great deal to undergo
them, but I had been challenged by fate. Only by extreme effort was I
finally able to escape from the labyrinth.

In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me
"underground," I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into
them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct
fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a
prey to the fantasies-and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well
what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that
there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to
gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the
risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making
the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients
something I did not dare to do myself. The excuse that a helper

stood at their side would not pass muster, for I was well aware that
the so-called helper-that is, myself-could not help them unless he
knew their fantasy material from his own direct experience, and that
at present all he possessed were a few theoretical prejudices of
dubious value. This idea-that I was committing myself to a
dangerous enterprise not for myself alone, but also for the sake of
my patients-helped me over several critical phases.

It was during Advent of the year 1913-December 12, to be exact-
that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once
more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was
as though the ground literally gave way at my feet, and I plunged
down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But
then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft,
sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete
darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom,
which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance
to a dark cave, in which stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he
were mummified. I squeezed past him through the narrow entrance
and waded knee deep through icy water to the other end in the cave
where, on a projecting rock, I saw a glowing red crystal. I grasped
the stone, lifted it, and discovered a hollow underneath. At first I
could make out nothing, but then I saw that there was running water.
In it a corpse floated by, a youth with blond hair and a wound in the
head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a
red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. Dazzled
by the light, I wanted to replace the stone upon the opening, but then
a fluid welled out. It was blood. A thick jet of it leaped up, and I felt
nauseated. It seemed to me that the blood continued to spurt for an
unendurably long time. At last it ceased, and the vision came to an
end.

I was stunned by this vision. I realized, of course, that it was a hero

and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, the rebirth
symbolized by the Egyptian scarab. At the end, the dawn of the new
day should have followed, but instead came that intolerable
outpouring of blood-an altogether abnormal phenomenon, so it
seemed to me. But then I recalled the vision of blood that I had had
in the autumn of that same year, and I abandoned all further attempt
to understand.

Six days later (December 18, 1913), I had the following dream. I
was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, I in a lonely,
rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was
already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn
sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We
were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over
the rocks.

Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in
the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the
dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When
he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck
dead.

Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so
great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the
murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain
began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the dead. I had
escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an
unbearable feeling of guilt remained.

When I awoke from the dream, I turned it over in my mind but was
unable to understand it. I tried therefore to fall asleep again, but a
voice within me said, "You must understand the dream, and must
do so at once!" The inner urgency mounted until the terrible moment
came when the voice said, "If you do not understand the dream, you

must shoot yourself!" In a drawer of my night table lay a loaded
revolver, and I became frightened. Then I began pondering once
again, and suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me.
"Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world."
Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve,
heroically to impose their will, have their own way. "Where there is a
will there is a way!" I had wanted to do the same. But now that was
no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied
by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be
killed.

After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I
myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as
well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his
ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic
idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the
ego's will, and to these one must bow.

These thoughts sufficed for the present, and I fell asleep again. The
small, brown-skinned savage who accompanied me and had
actually taken the initiative in the killing was an embodiment of the
primitive shadow. The rain showed that the tension between
consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved. Although
at the time I was not able to understand the meaning of the dream
beyond these few hints, new forces were released in me which
helped me to carry the experiment with the unconscious to a
conclusion.

In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep
descent. I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom.
The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand
feet; the next time I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It
was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space. First
came the image of a crater, and I had the feeling that I was in the

land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near
the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man
with a white beard and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my
courage and approached them as though they were real people,
and listened attentively to what they told me. The old man explained
that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. But the girl staggered
me even more, for she called herself Salome! She was blind. What
a strange couple: Salome and Elijah. But Elijah assured me that he
and Salome had belonged together from all eternity, which
completely astounded me... They had a black serpent living with
them which displayed an unmistakable fondness for me. I stuck
close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of
the three, and to have a clear intelligence. Of Salome was distinctly
suspicious. Elijah and I had a long conversation which, however, I
did not understand.

Naturally I tried to find a plausible explanation for the appearance of
Biblical figures in my fantasy by reminding myself that my father had
been a clergyman. But that really explained nothing at all. For what
did the old man signify? What did Salome signify? Why were they
together? Only many years later, when I knew a great deal more
than I knew then, did the connection between the old man and the
young girl appear perfectly natural to me.

In such dream wanderings one frequently encounters an old man
who is accompanied by a young girl, and examples of such couples
are to be found in many mythic tales. Thus, according to Gnostic
tradition, Simon Magus went about with a young girl whom he had
picked up in a brothel. Her name was Helen, and she was regarded
as the reincarnation of the Trojan Helen. Klingsor and Kundry, Lao-
tzu and the dancing girl, likewise belong to this category.

I have mentioned that there was a third figure in my fantasy besides
Elijah and Salome: the large black snake. In myths the snake is a

frequent counterpart of the hero. There are numerous accounts of
their affinity. For example, the hero has eyes like a snake, or after
his death he is changed into a snake and revered as such, or the
snake is his mother, etc. In my fantasy, therefore, the presence of
the snake was an indication of a hero-myth. Salome is an anima
figure. She is blind because she does not see the meaning of
things. Elijah is the figure of the wise old prophet and represents the
factor of intelligence and knowledge; Salome, the erotic element.
One might say that the two figures are personifications of Logos
and Eros. But such a definition would be excessively intellectual. It
is more meaningful to let the figures be what they were for me at the
time-namely, -events and experiences.

Soon after this fantasy another figure rose out of the unconscious.
He developed out of the Elijah figure. I called him Philemon.
Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic
atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration. His figure first appeared to
me in the following dream.

There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by clouds but by flat
brown clods of earth. It looked as if the clods were breaking apart
and the blue water of the sea were becoming visible between them.
But the water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from the
right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old
man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of
which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the
wings of the kingfisher with its characteristic colors.

Since I did not understand this dream-image, I painted it in order to
impress it upon my memory. During the days when I was occupied
with the painting, I found in my garden, by the lake shore, a dead
kingfisher! I was thunderstruck, for king- fishers are quite rare in the
vicinity of Zurich and I have never since found a dead one. The body
was recently dead-at the most, two or three days-and showed no

external injuries.

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the
crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not
produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.
Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies
I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not
consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who
spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them
myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or
people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, "If you should see
people in a room, you would not think that you had made those
people, or that you were responsible for them." It was he who taught
me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the
distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my
thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood
that there is something in me which can say things that I do not
know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against
me.

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a
mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if
he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden
with him, and to me he was what the Indians Call a guru.

Whenever the outlines of a new personification appeared, I felt it
almost as a personal defeat. It meant: "Here is something else you
didn't know until now!" Fear crept over me that the succession of
such figures might be endless, that I might lose myself in bottomless
abysses of ignorance. My ego felt devalued-although the
successes I had been having in worldly affair might have reassured
me. In my darknesses (horridas nostrae mentis purga tenebras-
"cleanse the horrible darknesses of mind"-the Aurora Consurgens
[4] says) I could have wished for nothing better than a real, live guru,

someone possessing superior knowledge and ability, who would
have disentangled for me the involuntary creations of my
imagination. This task undertaken by the figure of Philemon, whom
in this respect I had willy-nilly to recognize as my psychagogue. And
the fact was that he conveyed to me many an illuminating idea.

More than fifteen years later a highly cultivated elderly Indian visited
me, a friend of Gandhi's, and we talked about Indian education-in
particular, about the relationship between guru and chela. I
hesitantly asked him whether he could tell me anything about the
person and character of his own guru, whereppon he replied in a
matter-of-fact tone, "Oh yes, he was shankaracharya."

"You don't mean the commentator on the Vedas who died centuries
ago?" I asked.

"Yes, I mean him," he said, to my amazement.

"Then you are referring to a spirit?" I asked.

"Of course it was his spirit," he agreed.

At that moment I thought of Philemon.

"There are ghostly gurus too," he added. "Most people have living
gurus. But there are always some who have a spirit for teacher."

This information was both illuminating and reassuring to me.
Evidently, then, I had not plummeted right out of the human world,
but had only experienced the sort of thing that could happen to
others who made similar efforts.

Later, Philemon became relativized by the emergence of yet
another figure, whom I called Ka. In ancient Egypt the "king's ka"
was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy the ka-soul

came from below, out of the earth as if out of a deep shaft. I did a
painting of him, showing him in his earth-bound form, as a herm
with base of stone and upper part of bronze.

4 An alchemical treatise ascribed to Thomas Aquinas.

High up in the painting appears a kingfisher's wing, and between it
and the head of Ka floats a round, glowing nebula of Stars. Ka's
expression has something demonic about it-one might also say,
Mephistophelian. In one hand he holds something like a colored
pagoda, or a reliquary, and in the other a stylus with which he is
working on the reliquary. He is saying, "I am he who buries the gods
in gold and gems."

Philemon had a lame foot, but was a winged spirit, whereas Ka
represented a kind of earth demon or metal demon. Philemon was
the spiritual aspect, or "meaning." Ka, on the other hand, was a
spirit of nature like the Anthroparion of Greek alchemy-with which
at the time I was still unfamiliar? Ka was he who made everything
real, but who also obscured the halcyon spirit, Meaning, or replaced
it by beauty, the "eternal reflection."

In time I was able to integrate both figures through the study of
alchemy.

When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself,
"What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with
science. But then what is it?" Whereupon a voice within me said, "It
is art." I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I
was writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, "Perhaps
my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is
insisting on coming through to expression." I knew for a certainty
that the voice had come from a woman. 1 recognized it as the voice
of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference

to me. She had become a living ligure within my mind.

Obviously what I was doing wasn't science. What then could it be
but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the
world. That is the way a woman's mind works. I said very
emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had

5 The Anthroparion is a tiny man, a kind of homunculus. He is found, for
example, in the ysions of Zbsimos of Panopolis, an important alchemist of
the third century. To the group which includes the Anthroparion belong the
gnomes, the Dactyls of Classical antiquity, and the homunculi of the
alchemists. As the spirit of quick-sil\«r, the alchemical Mercurius was also
an Anthroparion. -A. J.

nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance. No voice
came through, however, and I kept on writing. Then came the next
assault, and again the same assertion: "That is art." This time I
caught her and said, "No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature,"
and prepared myself for an argument. When nothing of the sort
occurred, I reflected that the "woman within me" did not have the
speech centers I had. And so I suggested that she use mine. She
did so and came through with a long statement.

I was greatly intrigued by the fact that a woman should interfere with
me from within. My conclusion was that she must be the "soul," in
the primitive sense, and I began to speculate on the reasons why
the name "anima" was given to the soul. Why was it thought of as
feminine? Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a
typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of a man, and I called
her the "anima." The corresponding figure in the unconscious of
woman I called the "animus."

At first it was the negative aspect of the anima that most impressed
me. I felt a little awed by her. It was like the feeling of an invisible
presence in the room. Then a new idea came to me: in putting

down all this material for analysis I was in effect writing letters to the
anima, that is, to a part of myself with a different viewpoint from my
conscious one. I got remarks of an unusual and unexpected
character. I was like a patient in analysis with a ghost and a woman!
Every evening I wrote very conscientiously, for I thought if I did not
write, there would be no way for the anima to get at my fantasies.
Also, by writing them out I gave her no chance to twist them into
intrigues. There is a tremendous difference between intending to
tell something and actually telling it. In order to be as honest as
possible with myself, I wrote everything down very carefully,
following the old Greek maxim: "Give away all that thou hast, then
shalt thou receive."

Often, as I was writing, I would have peculiar reactions that threw
me off. Slowly I learned to distinguish between myself and the
interruption. When something emotionally vulgar or banal came up, I
would say to myself, "It is perfectly true that I have thought and felt
this way at some time or other, but I don't have to think and feel that
way now. I need not accept this banality of mine in perpetuity; that is
an unnecessary humiliation."

The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these
unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to
bring them into relationship with consciousness. That is the
technique for stripping them of their power. It is not too difficult to
personify them, as they always possess a certain degree of
autonomy, a separate identity of their own. Their autonomy is a
most uncomfortable thing to reconcile oneself to, and yet the very
fact that the unconscious presents itself in that way gives us the
best means of handling it.

What the anima said seemed to me full of a deep cunning. If I had
taken these fantasies of the unconscious as art, they would have
carried no more conviction than visual perceptions, as if I were

watching a movie. I would have felt no moral obligation toward
them. The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing
that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic
nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had followed her
voice, she would in all probability have said to me one day, "Do you
imagine the nonsense you're engaged in is really art? Not a bit."
Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the
unconscious, can utterly destroy a man. In the final analysis the
decisive factor is always consciousness, which can understand the
manifestations of the unconscious and take up a position toward
them.

But the anima has a positive aspect as well. It is she who
communicates the images of the unconscious to the conscious
mind, and that is what I chiefly valued her for. For decades I always
turned to the anima when I felt that my emotional behavior was
disturbed, and that something had been constellated in the
unconscious. I would then ask the anima: "Now what are you up to?
What do you see? I should like to know." After some resistance she
regularly produced an image. As soon as the image was there, the
unrest or the sense of oppression vanished. The whole energy of
these emotions was transformed into interest in and curiosity about
the image. I would speak with the anima about the images she
communicated to me, for I had to try to understand them as best I
could, just like a dream.

Today I no longer need these conversations with the anima, for I no
longer have such emotions. But if I did have them, I would deal with
them in the same way. Today I am directly conscious of the anima's
ideas because I have learned to accept the contents of the
unconscious and to understand them. I know how I must behave
toward the inner images. I can read their meaning directly from my
dreams, and therefore no longer need a mediator to communicate
them.

I wrote these fantasies down first in the Black Book; later, I
transferred them to the Red Book, which I also embellished with
drawings? It contains most of my mandala drawings. In the Red
Book I tried an esthetic elaboration of my fantasies, but never
finished it. I became aware that I had not yet found the right
language, that I still had to translate it into something else.
Therefore I gave up this estheticizing tendency in good time, in
favor of a rigorous process of understanding. I saw that I so much
fantasy needed firm ground underfoot, and that I must first return
wholly to reality. For me, reality meant scientific comprehension. I
had to draw concrete conclusions from the insights the unconscious
had given me-and that task was to become a life work.

It is of course ironical that I, a psychiatrist, should at almost every
step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material
which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane. This is the
fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental
patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which
has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is
present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even
appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to
entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the
unconscious. It is considered the path of error, of equivocation and
misunderstanding. I am reminded of Goethe's words: "Now let me
dare to open wide the

6 The Black Book consists of six blackbound, smallish leather notebooks.
The Red Book, a folio \clume bound in red leather, contains the same
fantasies couched in elaborately literary form and language, and set down in
calligraphic Gothic script, in the manner of medieval manuscripts. -A. J.

gate / Past which men's steps have ever flinching trod."[7] The
second part of Faust, too, was more than a literary exercise. It is a

link in the Aurea Catena [8] which has existed from the beginnings
of philosophical alchemy and Gnosticism down to Nietzsche's
Zarathustra. Unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage
of discovery to the other pole of the world. Particularly at this time,
when I was working on the fantasies, I needed a point of support in
"this world," and I may say that my family and my professional work
were that to me. It was most essential for me to have a normal life in
the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world. My
family and my profession remained the base to which I could always
return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person.
The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But
my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a
Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five
children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht-these were
actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again
and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling
about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche had lost
the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than
the inner world of his thoughts-which incidentally possessed him
more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and
therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. For me, such
irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after all, at this
world and this life. No matter how deeply absorbed or how blown
about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was
ultimately directed at this real life of mine. I meant to meet its
obligations and fulfill its meanings. My watchword was: Hie Rhodus,
hicsalta!

Thus my family and my profession always remained a joyful reality
and a guarantee that I also had a normal existence. Very gradually
the outlines of an inner change began making their appearance
within me. In 1916 I felt an urge to give shape

7 Faust, Part One.

8 The Golden (or Homeric) Chain in alchemy is the series of great wise
men, beginning with Hermes Trismegistos, which links earth with hea\en-A.
J.

to something. I was compelled from within, as it were, to formulate
and express what might have been said by Philemon. This was how
the Septem Sermones ed Mortuos" with its peculiar language
came into being.

It began with a restlessness, but I did not know what it meant or
what "they" wanted of me. There was an ominous atmosphere all
around me. I had the strange feeling that the air was filled with
ghostly entities. Then it was as if my house began to be haunted.
My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room.
My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that
twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away; and that
same night my nine-year-old son had an anxiety dream. In the
morning he asked his mother for crayons, and he, who ordinarily
never drew, now made a picture of his dream. He called it "The
Picture of the Fisherman." Through the middle of the picture ran a
river, and a fisherman with a rod was standing on the shore. He had
caught a fish. On the fisherman's head was a chimney from which
flames were leaping and smoke rising. From the other side of the
river the devil came flying through the air. He was cursing because
his fish had been stolen. But above the fisherman hovered an angel
who said, "You cannot do anything to him; he only catches the bad
fish!" My son drew this picture on a Saturday.

Around five o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday the front doorbell
began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids
were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front
door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was
there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell,
and not only heard it but saw it moving. We all simply stared at one

another. The atmosphere was thick, believe mel Then I knew that
something had to happen. The whole house was filled as if there
were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed
deep right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely
possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the
question: "For God's

9 Privately printed (n.d.) and pseudonymously subtitled "The Seven
Sermons to the Dead written by Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the
East toucheth the West" (see Appendix V).

sake, what in the world is this?" Then they cried out in chorus, "We
have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we
sought." That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones.

Then it began to flow out of me, and in the course of three evenings
the thing was written. As soon as I took up the pen, the whole
ghostly assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the
atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.

The experience has to be taken for what it was, or as it seems to
have been. No doubt it was connected with the state of emotion I
was in at the time, and which was favorable to parapsychological
phenomena. It was an unconscious constellation whose peculiar
atmosphere I recognized as the numen of an archetype. "It walks
abroad, it's in the air!"[10] The intellect, of course, would like to
arrogate to itself some scientific, physical knowledge of the affair,
or, preferably, to write the whole thing off as a violation of the rules.
But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not violated
sometimes!

Shortly before this experience I had written down a fantasy of my
soul having flown away from me. This was a significant event: the
soul, the anima, establishes the relationship to the unconscious. In a
certain sense this is also a relationship to the collectivity of the

dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the
dead, the land of the ancestors. If, therefore, one has a fantasy of
the soul vanishing, this means that it has withdrawn into the
unconscious or into the land of the dead. There it produces a
mysterious animation and gives visible form to the ancestral traces,
the collective contents. Like a medium, it gives the dead a chance
to manifest themselves. Therefore, soon after the disappearance of
my soul the "dead" appeared to me, and the result was the Septem
Sermones. This is an example of what is called "loss of soul"-a
phenomenon encountered quite frequently among primitives.

From that time on, the dead have become ever more distinct for me
as the voices of the Unanswered, Unresolved, and Unredeemed;
for since the questions and demands which my destiny required me
to answer did not come to me from outside,

10 Faust, Part Two.

they must have come from the inner world. These conversations
with the dead formed a kind of prelude to what I had to
communicate to the world about the unconscious: a kind of pattern
of order and interpretation of its general contents.

When I look back upon it all today and consider what happened to
me during the period of my work on the fantasies, it seems as
though a message had come to me with overwhelming force. There
were things in the images which concerned not only myself but
many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself
alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on, my life
belonged to the generality. The knowledge I was concerned with, or
was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days. I
myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to
plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise
they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity. It

was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it
and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself
over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my
existence and live it as fully as possible.

Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial
experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from
those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty
years ago. Everything that I accomplished in later life was already
contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and
images.

My science was the only way I had of extricating myself from that
chaos. Otherwise the material would have trapped me in its thicket,
strangled me like jungle creepers. I took great care to try to
understand every single image, every item of my psychic inventory,
and to classify them scientifically-so far as this was possible-and,
above all, to realize them in actual life. That is what we usually
neglect to do. We allow the images to rise up, and maybe we
wonder about them, but that is all. We do not take the trouble to
understand them, let alone draw ethical conclusions from them. This
stopping-short conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious.

It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to gain some
understanding of the images and that knowledge can here make a
halt. Insight into them must be converted into an ethical obligation.
Not to do so is to fall prey to the power principle, and this produces
dangerous effects which are destructive not only to others but even
to the knower. The images of the unconscious place a great
responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking
of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and
imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

In the midst of this period when I was so preoccupied with the

images of the unconscious, I came to the decision to withdraw from
the university, where I had lectured for eight years as Privatdozent
(since 1905). My experience and experiments with the unconscious
had brought my intellectual activity to a standstill. After the
completion of The Psychology of the Unconscious.[11] I found
myself utterly incapable of reading a scientific book. This went on
for three years. I felt I could no longer keep up with the world of the
intellect, nor would I have been able to talk about what really
preoccupied me. The material brought to light from the unconscious
had, almost literally, struck me dumb. [12] I could neither understand
it nor give it form. At the university I was in an exposed position, and
felt that in order to go on giving courses there I would first have to
find an entirely new and different orientation. It would be unfair to
continue teaching young students when my own intellectual situation
was nothing but a mass of doubts.

I therefore felt that I was confronted with the choice of either
continuing my academic career, whose road lay smooth before me,
or following the laws of my inner personality, of a higher reason, and
forging ahead with this curious task of mine, this experiment in
confrontation with the unconscious. But until it was completed I
could not appear before the public.

11 See above, Chap. V, n. 5, p. 155.

12 During this "fallow period" Jung wrote very little: a handful of papers in
English, and the very important first versions of the essays published in
English translation as Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7). The
period came to an end with the publication of Psychologische Typen in 1921
(English trans.; Psychological Types, CW6.)-A.J.

Consciously, deliberately, then, I abandoned my academic career.
For I felt that something great was happening to me, and I put my
trust in the thing which I felt to be more important sub specie
aeternitatis. I knew that it would fill my life, and for the sake of that
goal I was ready to take any kind of risk.

What, after all, did it matter whether or not I became a professor?
Of course it bothered me to have to give this up; in many respects I
regretted that I could not confine myself to generally understandable
material. I even had moments when I stormed against destiny. But
emotions of this kind are transitory, and do not count. The other
thing, on the contrary, is important, and if we pay heed to what the
inner personality desires and says, the sting vanishes. That is
something I have experienced again and again, not only when I
gave up my academic career. Indeed, I had my first experiences of
this sort as a child. In my youth I was hot-tempered; but whenever
the emotion had reached its climax, suddenly it swung around and
there followed a cosmic stillness. At such times I was remote from
everything, and what had only a moment before excited me seemed
to belong to a distant past.

The consequence of my resolve, and my involvement with things
which neither I nor anyone else could understand, was an extreme
loneliness. I was going about laden with thoughts of which I could
speak to no one: they would only have been misunderstood. I felt
the gulf between the external world and the interior world of images
in its most painful form. I could not yet see that interaction of both
worlds which I now understand. I saw only an irreconcilable
contradiction between "inner" and "outer."

However, it was clear to me from the start that I could find contact
with the outer world and with people only if I succeeded in showing-
and this would demand the most intensive effort-that the contents
of psychic experience are real, and real not only as my own
personal experiences, but as collective experiences which others
also have. Later I tried to demonstrate this in my scientific work, and
I did all in my power to convey to my intimates a new way of seeing
things. I knew that if I did not succeed, I would be condemned to
absolute isolation.

It was only toward the end of the First World War that I gradually
began to emerge from the darkness. Two events contributed to this.
The first was that I broke with the woman who was determined to
convince me that my fantasies had artistic value; the second and
principal event was that I began to understand mandala drawings.
This happened in 1918-19. I had painted the first mandala [13] in
1916 after writing the Septem Sermones; naturally I had not, then,
understood it.

In 1918-19 I was in Chateau d'Oex as Commandant de la Region
Anglaise des Internes de Guerre. While I was there I sketched every
morning in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which
seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the
help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations
from day to day. One day, for example, I received a letter from that
esthetic lady in which she again stubbornly maintained that the
fantasies arising from my unconscious had artistic value and should
be considered art. The letter got on my nerves. It was far from
stupid, and therefore dangerously persuasive. The modern artist,
after all, seeks to create art out of the unconscious. The
utilitarianism and self-importance concealed behind this thesis
touched a doubt in myself, namely, my uncertainty as to whether the
fantasies I was producing were really spontaneous and natural, and
not ultimately my own arbitrary inventions. I was by no means free
from the bigotry and hubris of consciousness which wants to
believe that any halfway decent inspiration is due to one's own
merit, whereas inferior reactions come merely by chance, or even
derive from alien sources. Out of this irritation and disharmony
within myself there proceeded, the following day, a changed
mandala: part of the periphery had burst open and the Symmetry
was destroyed.

Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is:

13 Reproduced as the frontispiece to The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious (CW g, 1).-A. J.

"Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation."[14]
And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all
goes well is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions.

My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self
which were presented to me anew each day. In them I saw the self-
that is, my whole being-actively at work. To be sure, at first I could
only dimly understand them; but they seemed to me highly
significant, and I guarded them like precious pearls. I had the
distinct feeling that they were something central, and in time I
acquired through them a living conception of the self. The self, I
thought, was like the monad which I am, and which is my world. The
mandala represents this monad, and corresponds to the
microcosmic nature of the psyche.

I no longer know how many mandalas I drew at this time. There
were a great many. While I was working on them, the question
arose repeatedly: What is this process leading to? Where is its
goal? From my own experience, I knew by now that I could not
presume to choose a goal which would seem trustworthy to me. It
had been proved to me that I had to abandon the idea of the
superordinate position of the ego. After all, I had been brought up
short when I had attempted to maintain it. I had wanted to go on with
the scientific analysis of myths which I had begun in Wandlungen
und Symbole. That was still my goal-but I must not think of that! I
was being compelled to go through this process of the
unconscious. I had to let myself be carried along by the current,
without a notion of where it would lead me. When I began drawing
the mandalas, however, I saw that everything, all the paths I had
been following, all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a

single point-namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain
to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It
is the path to the center, to individuation.

During those years, between 1918 and 1920, 1 began to understand
that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear
evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self.

14 Faust, Part Two, trans, by Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth,
England, Penguin Books Ltd., 1959), p. 79.

Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later,
everything points toward the center. This insight gave me stability,
and gradually my inner peace returned. I knew that in finding the
mandala as an expression of the self I had attained what was for
me the ultimate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.

Some years later (in 1927) I obtained confirmation of my ideas
about the center and the self by way of a dream. I represented its
essence in a mandala which I called "Window on Eternity? The
picture is reproduced in The Secret of the Golden Flower (Fig.
3).[15] A year later I painted a second picture, like wise a
mandala, [16] with a golden castle in the center. When it was
finished, I asked myself, "Why is this so Chinese?" I was impressed
by the form and choice of colors, which seemed to me Chinese,
although there was nothing outwardly Chinese about it. Yet that was
how it affected me. It was a strange coincidence that shortly
afterward I received a letter from Richard Wilhelm enclosing the
manuscript of a Taoist-alchemical treatise entitled The Secret of the
Golden Flower, with a request that I write a commentary on it. I
devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-
of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the
circumambulation of the center. That was the first event which broke
through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish

ties with something and someone."

In remembrance of this coincidence, this "synchronicity," I wrote
underneath the picture which had made so Chinese an impression
upon me: "In 1928, when I was painting this picture, showing the
golden, well-fortified castle, Richard Wilhelm in Frankfurt sent me
the thousand-year-old Chinese text on the yellow castle, the germ of
the immortal body."

This is the dream I mentioned earlier: I found myself in a dirty, sooty
city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining.

15 Cf. "Concerning Mandala Symbolism? in The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious (CW 9, i, ), tig. 6 and pp. 363 ff.

16 The Secret of the Golden Flower, Eg. 10. See also "Concerning Mandala
Symbolism," fig. 36 and p. 377.

17 On Richard Wilhelm, see Appendix IV, pp. 373-77.

I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss-say, half a dozen-l
walked through the dark streets. I had the feeling that there we were
coming from the harbor, and that the real city was actually up above,
on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where
the market is down below and then you go up through the
Totengasschen ("Alley of the Dead"), which leads to a plateau
above and so to the Petersplatz and the Peterskirche. When we
reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by
street lights, into which many streets converged. The various
quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the
center was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island.
While everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke,
and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it
stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It
was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and were at the same
time the source of light. My companions commented on the
abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They

spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed
surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the
beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought, "I
know very well why he has settled here." Then I awoke.

On one detail of the dream I must add a supplementary comment:
the individual quarters of the city were themselves arranged radially
around a central point. This point formed a small open square
illuminated by a larger street lamp, and constituted a small replica
of the island. I knew that the "other Swiss" lived in the vicinity of one
of these secondary centers.

This dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the
grayish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain.
Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque-just as I
felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was
why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the "pool of life." The "liver,"
according to an old view, is the seat of life— that which "makes to
live."

This dream brought with it a sense of finality. I saw that here the
goal had been revealed. One could not go beyond the center. The
center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center.
Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and
archetype of orientation and meaning. Therein lies its healing
function. For me, this insight signified an approach to the center
and therefore to the goal. Out of it emerged a first inkling of my
personal myth.

After this dream I gave up drawing or painting mandalas. The
dream depicted the climax of the whole process of development of
consciousness. It satisfied me completely, for it gave a total picture
of my situation. I had known, to be sure, that I was occupied with
something important, but I still lacked understanding, and there had

been no one among my associates who could have understood.
The clarification brought about by the dream made it possible for
me to take an objective view of the things that filled my being.

Without such a vision I might perhaps have lost my orientation and
been compelled to abandon my undertaking. But here the meaning
had been made clear. When I parted from Freud, I knew that I was
plunging into the unknown. Beyond Freud, after all, I knew nothing;
but I had taken the step into darkness. When that happens, and then
such a dream comes, one feels it as an act of grace.

It has taken me virtually forty-five years to distill within the vessel of
my scientific work the things I experienced and wrote down at that
time. As a young man my goal had been to accomplish something
in my science. But then, I hit upon this stream of lava, and the heat
of its fires reshaped my life. That was the primal stuff which
compelled me to work upon it, and my works are a more or less
successful endeavor to incorporate this incandescent matter into
the contemporary picture of the world.

The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most
important in my life — in them everything essential was decided. It all
began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications
of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first
swamped me. It was the primo materia for a lifetime's work.

VII

The Work

AS MY LIFE entered its second half, I was already embarked on the
confrontation with the contents of the unconscious. My work on this
was an extremely long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some
twenty years of it that I reached some degree of understanding of
my fantasies.

First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner
experiences. That is to say, I had to ask myself, "Where have my
particular premises already occurred in history?" If I had not
succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able
to substantiate my ideas. Therefore, my encounter with alchemy
was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis
which I had hitherto lacked.

Analytical psychology is fundamentally a natural science, but it is
subject far more than any other science to the personal bias of the
observer. The psychologist must depend therefore in the highest
degree upon historical and literary parallels if he wishes to exclude
at least the crudest errors in judgment. Between 1918 and 1926 I
had seriously studied the Gnostic writers, for they too had been
confronted with the primal world of the unconscious and had dealt
with its contents, with images that were obviously contaminated with
the world of instinct. Just how they understood these images
remains difficult to say, in view of the paucity of the accounts which,
moreover, mostly stem from their opponents, the Church Fathers. It
seems to me highly unlikely that they had a psychological
conception of them. But the Gnostics were too remote for me to
establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were

confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have
connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed,
and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led
from Gnosticism or neo-Platonism to the contemporary world. But
when I began to understand alchemy I realized that it represented
the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity therefore
existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural
philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the
one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the
future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

This had been inaugurated by Freud, who had introduced along
with it the classical Gnostic motifs of sexuality and the wicked
paternal authority. The motif of the Gnostic Yahweh and Creator-
God reappeared in the Freudian myth of the primal father and the
gloomy superego deriving from that father. In Freud's myth he
became a daemon who created a world of disappointments,
illusions, and suffering. But the materialistic trend which had already
come to light in the alchemists' preoccupation with the secrets of
matter had the effect of obscuring for Freud that other essential
aspect of Gnosticism: the primordial image of the spirit as another,
higher god who gave to mankind the krater (mixing vessel), the
vessel of spiritual transformational] The krater is a feminine
principle which could find no place in Freud's patriarchal world.
Incidentally, he is by no means alone in this prejudice, In the realm
of Catholic

1 In the writings of Poimandres, a pagan Gnostic, the footer was a vessel
filled with spirit, which the Creator-god sent down to earth so that those who
strove for higher consciousness might be baptized in it. It was a kind of
uterus of spiritual renewal and rebirth, and corresponded to the alchemical
'vas' in which the transformation of substances took place. The parallel to
this in Jung's psychology is the inner transformation process known as
individuation (see glossary). A. J.

thought the Mother of God and Bride of Christ has been received
into the divine thalamus (bridal chamber) only recently, after
centuries of hesitancy, and thus at least been accorded partial
recognition.[2] But in the Protestant and Jewish spheres the father
continues to dominate as much as ever. In philosophical alchemy,
on the other hand, the feminine principle plays a role equal to that of
the masculine.

Before I discovered alchemy, I had a series of dreams which
repeatedly dealt with the same theme. Beside my house stood
another, that is to say, another wing or annex, which was strange to
me. Each time I would wonder in my dream why I did not know this
house, although it had apparently always been there. Finally came a
dream in which I reached the other wing. I discovered there a
wonderful library, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Large, fat folio volumes, bound in pigskin, stood along
the walls. Among them were a number of books embellished with
copper engravings of a strange character, and illustrations
containing curious symbols such as I had never seen before. At the
time I did not know to what they referred; only much later did I
recognize them as alchemical symbols. In the dream I was
conscious only of the fascination exerted by them and by the entire
library. It was a collection of medieval incunabula and sixteenth-
century prints.

The unknown wing of the house was a part of my personality, an
aspect of myself; it represented something that belonged to me but
of which I was not yet conscious. It, and especially the library,
referred to alchemy, of which I was ignorant, but which I was soon to
study. Some fifteen years later I had assembled a library very like
the one in the dream.

The crucial dream anticipating my encounter with alchemy came
around 1926: I was in the South Tyrol. It was wartime. I was on the

Italian front and driving back from the front line

2 This refers to the Papal Bull of Pius XI, Munifcentissimus Deus (1950),
promulgating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The new dogma
affirms that Mary as the Bride is united with the Son in the hea\enly bridal
chamber, and as Sophia (Wisdom) she is united with the Godhead. Thus
the feminine principle is brought into immediate proximity with the
masculine Trinity. Cf. Jung, "Answer to Job," in Psychology and Religion:
West and East ( CW 1 1 ), pp. 458 ff. A. J.

with a little man, a peasant, in his horse-drawn wagon. All around us
shells were exploding, and I knew that we had to push on as quickly
as possible, for it was very dangerous. [3]

We had to cross a bridge and then go through a tunnel whose
vaulting had been partially destroyed by the shells. Arriving at the
end of the tunnel, we saw before us a sunny landscape, and I
recognized it as the region around Verona. Below me lay the city,
radiant in full sunlight. I felt relieved, and we drove on out into the
green, thriving Lombard plain. The road led through lovely
springtime countryside; we saw the rice fields, the olive trees, and
the vineyards. Then, diagonally across the road, I caught sight of a
large building, a manor house of grand proportions, rather like the
palace of a North Italian duke. It was a typical manor house with
many annexes and outbuildings. Just as at the Louvre, the road led
through a large courtyard and past the palace. The little coachman
and myself drove in through a gate, and from here we could see,
through a second gate at the far end, the sunlit landscape again. I
looked around: to my right was the fagade of the manor house, to
my left the servants' quarters and the stables, barns, and other
outbuildings, which stretched on for a long way.

Just as we reached the middle of the courtyard, in front of the main
entrance, something unexpected happened: with a dull clang, both
gates flew shut. The peasant leaped down from his seat and

exclaimed, "Now we are caught in the seventeenth century."
Resignedly 1 thought, "Well, that's that! But what is there to do about
it? Now we shall be caught for years." Then the consoling thought
came to me: "Someday, years from now, I shall get out again."

After this dream 1 plowed through ponderous tomes on the history of
the world, of religion, and of philosophy, without finding anything that
could help me explain the dream. Not

3 The shells falling from the sky were, interpreted psychologically, missiles
coming from the "other side," They were, therefore, effects emanating from
the unconscious, from the shadow side of the mind. The happenings in the
dream suggested that the war, which in the outer world had taken place
some years before, was not yet over, but was continuing to be fought within
the psyche. Here, apparently, was to be found the solution of problems
which could not be found in the outer world. C. G. J.

until much later did I realize that it referred to alchemy, for that
science reached its height in the seventeenth century. Oddly
enough, I had entirely forgotten what Herbert Silberer had written
about alchemy.[4] At the time his book was published, I regarded
alchemy as something off the beaten track and rather silly, much as
I appreciated Silberer's anagogic or constructive point of view. I
was in correspondence with him at the time and had let him know
how much I valued his work. As his tragic death shows, Silberer's
discovery of the problem was not followed by insight into it.[5] He
had used in the main late material, which I could make nothing of.
The late alchemical texts are fantastic and baroque; only after we
have learned how to interpret them can we recognize what
treasures they hide.

Light on the nature of alchemy began to come to me only after I had
read the text of the Golden Flower, that specimen of Chinese
alchemy which Richard Wilhelm sent me in 1928. I was stirred by
the desire to become more closely acquainted with the alchemical

texts. I commissioned a Munich bookseller to notify me of any
alchemical books that might fall into his hands. Soon afterward I
received the first of them, the Artis Auriferae Volumina Duo (1593),
a comprehensive collection of Latin treatises among which are a
number of the "classics" of alchemy.

I let this book lie almost untouched for nearly two years.
Occasionally I would look at the pictures, and each time I would
think, "Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to
understand." But it persistently intrigued me, and I made up my
mind to go into it more thoroughly. The next winter I began, and
soon found it provocative and exciting. To be sure, the texts still
seemed to me blatant nonsense, but here and there would be
passages that seemed significant to me, and occasionally I even
found a few sentences which I thought I could understand. Finally I
realized that the alchemists were talking in symbols those old
acquaintances of mine. "Why, this is fantastic," I thought. "I simply
must learn to decipher all this." By now I was

4 Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (New York, 1917; Gennan
edn., Vienna, 1914).

5 Silberer committed suicide,

completely fascinated, and buried myself in the texts as often as I
had the time. One night, while I was studying them, I suddenly
recalled the dream that I was caught in the seventeenth century. At
last I grasped its meaning. "So that's it! Now I am condemned to
study alchemy from the very beginning."

It was a long while before I found my way about in the labyrinth of
alchemical thought processes, for no Ariadne had put a thread into
my hand. Reading the sixteenth-century text, "Rosarium
Philosophorum" I noticed that certain strange expressions and turns
of phrase were frequently repeated. For example, "solve et

coagula" "unum vas" "lapis," "prima materia" "Mercurius" etc. I saw
that these expressions were used again and again in a particular
sense, but I could not make out what that sense was. I therefore
decided to start a lexicon of key phrases with cross references. In
the course of time I assembled several thousand such key phrases
and words, and had volumes filled with excerpts. I worked along
philological lines, as if I were trying to solve the riddle of an unknown
language. In this way the alchemical mode of expression gradually
yielded up its meaning. It was a task that kept me absorbed for
more than a decade.

I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most
curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were,
in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This
was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the
historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The
possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted
intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my
psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into
place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in
my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to
understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in
historical perspective. My understanding of their typical character,
which had already begun with my investigation of myths, was
deepened. The primordial images and the nature of the archetype
took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me
that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no
psychology of the unconscious. A psychology of consciousness
can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life,
but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an
anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of
consciousness. And when in the course of treatment unusual
decisions are called for, dreams occur that need more than

personal memories for their interpretation.

I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to
Goethe. Goethe's secret was that he was in the grip of that process
of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the
centuries. He regarded his Faust as an opus magnum or divinum.
He called it his "main business," and his whole life was enacted
within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active
within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process, the
great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal world).

I myself am haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year
I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my "main
business." My life has been permeated and held together by one
idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the
personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and
all my works relate to this one theme.

My real scientific work began with the association experiment in
1903. I regard it as my first scientific work in the sense of an
undertaking in the field of natural science. Studies in Word
Association was followed by two psychiatric papers whose origin I
have already discussed: "The Psychology of Dementia Praecox"
and "The Content of the Psychoses." In 1912 my book Wandlungen
und Symbole der Libido was published, and my friendship with
Freud came to an end. From then on, I had to make my way alone,

I had a starting point in my intense preoccupation with the images
of my own unconscious. This period lasted from 1913 to 1917; then
the stream of fantasies ebbed away. Not until it had subsided and I
was no longer held captive inside the magic mountain was I able to
take an objective view of that whole experience and begin to reflect
upon it. The first question I asked myself was, "What does one do
with the unconscious?" "The Relations between the Ego and the

Unconscious"[6] was my answer. In Paris I had delivered a lecture
on this subject in 1916;[7] it was, however, not published in German
until twelve years later, in greatly expanded form. In it I described
some of the typical contents of the unconscious, and showed that it
is by no means a matter of indifference what attitude the conscious
mind takes toward them.

Simultaneously, I was busy with preparatory work for Psychological
Types, first published in 1921. This work sprang originally from my
need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud's
and Adler's. In attempting to answer this question, I came across
the problem of types; for it is one's psychological type which from
the outset determines and limits a person's judgment. My book,
therefore, was an effort to deal with the relationship of the individual
to the world, to people and things. It discussed the various aspects
of consciousness, the various attitudes the conscious mind might
take toward the world, and thus constitutes a psychology of
consciousness regarded from what might be called a clinical angle.
I worked a great deal of literature into this book. The writings of
Spitteler occupied a special place, in particular his Prometheus
and Epimetheus;[8] but I also discussed Schiller, Nietzsche, and the
intellectual history of the classical era and the Middle Ages. I was
presumptuous enough to send a copy of my book to Spitteler. He
did not answer me, but shortly afterward delivered a lecture in which
he declared positively that his Prometheus and Epimetheus
"meant" nothing, that he might just as well have sung, "Spring is
come, tra-la-la-la-la."

The book on types yielded the insight that every judgment made by
an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every
point of view is necessarily relative. This raised

6 In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7) .

7 "La Structure de I'inconscient," Archies de psychologie, >J/I (Geneva,

1916), 62, 152-79. See CW 7, Appendix 2, "The Structure of the

Unconscious."

8 Carl Spitteler (1845-1924) was a Swiss writer whose best-known works,

besides Prometheus and Epimetheus, include the epic Der Olympische

Fruhling and the novel Imago. In 1919 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for

literature.

the question of the unity which must compensate this diversity, and
it led me directly to the Chinese concept of Tao. I have already
spoken of the interplay between my inner development and Richard
Wilhelm's sending me a Taoist text. In 1929 he and I collaborated
on The Secret of the Golden Flower. It was only after I had reached
the central point in my thinking and in my researches, namely, the
concept of the self, that I once more found my way back to the
world. I began delivering lectures and taking a number of journeys.
The various essays and lectures formed a kind of counterpoise to
the years of interior searching. They also contained answers to the
questions that were put to me by my readers and patients. [9]

A subject with which I had been deeply concerned ever since my
book Wandlungen und Symbole was the theory of the libido. I
conceived the libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,
hence as a more or less quantitative concept, which therefore
should not be defined in qualitative terms. My idea was to escape
from the then prevailing concretism of the libido theory in other
words, I wished no longer to speak of the instincts of hunger,
aggression, and sex, but to regard all these phenomena as
expressions of psychic energy.

In physics, too, we speak of energy and its various manifestations,
such as electricity, light, heat, etc. The situation in psychology is
precisely the same. Here, too, we are dealing primarily with energy,
that is to say, with measures of intensity, with greater or lesser
quantities. It can appear in various guises. If we conceive of libido
as energy, we can take a comprehensive and unified view.

Qualitative questions as to the nature of the libido whether it be
sexuality, power, hunger, or something else recede into the
background. What I wished to do for psychology was to arrive at
some logical and thorough view such as is provided in the physical
sciences by the theory of energetics. This is what I was after in my
paper "On Psychic Energy" (1928). I see man's drives, for example,
as various manifestations of energic processes and thus as forces
analogous to heat, light, etc. Just as it would not occur to the
modern physicist to derive all forces from, shall We say, heat alone,
so the psychologist should beware of lumping all instincts under the
concept of sexuality. This was Freud's initial error which he later
corrected by his assumption of "ego-instincts." Still later he brought
in the superego, and conferred virtual supremacy upon it.

9 These works are distributed mainly among wlumes 4, 8, 10, and 16 of the
Collected Works.

In "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" I had
discussed only my preoccupation with the unconscious, and
something of the nature of that preoccupation, but had not yet said
anything much about the unconscious itself. As I worked with my
fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious undergoes or
produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy
did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche
is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the
contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation
can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left
its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their
changing symbols. Through the study of these collective
transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical
symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the
process of individuation.

An essential aspect of my work is that it soon began to touch on the

question of one's view of the world, and on the relations between
psychology and religion. I went into these matters in detail first in
"Psychology and Religion" (1938) and then, as a direct offshoot of
this, in Paracelsica (1942). The second essay in this book,
"Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon," is of particular
importance from this point of view. The writings of Paracelsus
contain a wealth of original ideas, including clear formulations of the
questions posed by the alchemists, though these are set forth in
late and baroque dress. Through Paracelsus I was finally led to
discuss the nature of alchemy in relation to religion and psychology
or, to put it another way, of alchemy as a form of religious
philosophy. This I did in Psychology and Alchemy ( 1944). Thus I
had at last reached the ground which underlay my own experiences
of the years 1913 to 1917; for the process through which I had
passed at that time corresponded to the process of alchemical
transformation discussed in that book.

It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the
question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to
Christianity as well as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door
open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central
importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a
new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the
contemporary spirit. Otherwise, it stands apart from the times, and
has no effect on man's wholeness. I have endeavored to show this
in my writings. I have given a psychological interpretation of the
dogma of the Trinity and of the text of the Mass which, moreover, I
compared with the visions described by Zosimos of Panopolis, a
third-century alchemist and Gnostic. [10] My attempt to bring
analytical psychology into relation with Christianity ultimately led to
the question of Christ as a psychological figure. As early as 1944,
in Psychology and Alchemy, I had been able to demonstrate the
parallelism between the Christ f gure and the central concept of the

alchemists, the lapis, or stone.

In 1939 I gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius
Loyola. At the same time I was occupied on the studies for
Psychology and Alchemy. One night I awoke and saw, bathed in
bright light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It
was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body
was made of greenish gold. The vision was marvelously beautiful,
and yet I was profoundly shaken by it. A vision as such is nothing
unusual for me, for I frequently see extremely vivid hypnagogic
images.

I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the
meditations from the Spiritual Exercises. The vision came to me as
if to point out that I had overlooked something in iny reflections: the
analogy of Christ with the aurum nonvulgi and the viriditas of the
alchemists.[11] When I realized that the vision pointed to this central
alchemical symbol, and that

10 Both studies are included in Psychology and Religion: West and East (
CW11 )

11 The more serious alchemists realized that the purpose of their work was
not the transmutation of base metals into gold, but the production of an
aurum non vulgi ("not the common gold") or aurum philosophicum
("philosophical gold"). In other words, they were concerned with spiritual
values and the problem of psychic transformation. A. J.

I had had an essentially alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted.

The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not
only in man but also in inorganic nature. It is an expression of the
life-spirit, the anima mundi or films macrocosmi, the Anthropos who
animates the whole cosmos. This spirit has poured himself out into
everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and
stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his

analogue in matter, the filius macrocosmi. If I had not been so struck
by the greenish-gold, I would have been tempted to assume that
something essential was missing from my "Christian" view in other
words, that my traditional Christ-image was somehow inadequate
and that I still had to catch up with part of the Christian development.
The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised
alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and
physically dead matter.

I took up the problem of Christ again in Aion.[12] Here I was
concerned not with the various historical parallels but with the
relation of the Christ figure to psychology. Nor did I see Christ as a
figure stripped of all externalities. Rather, I wished to show the
development, extending over the centuries, of the religious content
which he represented. It was also important to me to show how
Christ could have been astrologically predicted, and how he was
understood both in terms of the spirit of his age and in the course of
two thousand years of Christian civilization. This was what I wanted
to portray, together with all the curious marginal glosses which have
accumulated around him in the course of the centuries.

As I delved into all these matters the question of the historical
person, of Jesus the man, also came up. It is of importance
because the collective mentality of his time one might also say: the
archetype which was already constellated, the primordial image of
the Anthropos was condensed in him, an almost unknown Jewish
prophet. The ancient idea of the Anthropos, whose roots lie in
Jewish tradition on the one hand

12 English trans., under same title, in 1959 (CW 9, **)

and in the Egyptian Horus myth on the other, had taken possession
of the people at the beginning of the Christian era, for it was part of
the Zeitgeist. It was essentially concerned with the Son of Man,

God's own son, who stood opposed to the deified Augustus, the
ruler of this world. This idea fastened upon the originally Jewish
problem of the Messiah and made it a world problem.

It would be a serious misunderstanding to regard as "mere
chance'* the fact that Jesus, the carpenter's son, proclaimed the
gospel and became the savior of the world. He must have been a
person of singular gifts to have been able so completely to express
and to represent the general, though unconscious, expectations of
his age. No one else could have been the bearer of such a
message; it was possible only for this particular man Jesus.

In those times the omnipresent, crushing power of Rome,
embodied in the divine Caesar, had created a world where
countless individuals, indeed whole peoples, were robbed of their
cultural independence and of their spiritual autonomy. Today,
individuals and cultures are faced with a similar threat, namely of
being swallowed up in the mass. Hence in many places there is a
wave of hope in a reappearance of Christ, and a visionary rumor
has even arisen which expresses expectations of redemption. The
form it has taken, however, is comparable to nothing in the past, but
is a typical child of the "age of technology." This is the worldwide
distribution of the UFO phenomenon (unidentified flying
objects).[13]

Since my aim was to demonstrate the full extent to which my
psychology corresponded to alchemy or vice versa I wanted to
discover, side by side with the religious questions, what special
problems of psychotherapy were treated in the work of the
alchemists. The main problem of medical psychotherapy is the
transference. In this matter Freud and I were in complete
agreement. I was able to demonstrate that alchemy, too, had
something that corresponded to the transference-

13 Cf. Flying Saucers: A Modem Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New
York and London, 1959); also in Civilization in Transition (CW 10).

namely, the concept of the coniunctio, whose pre-eminent
importance had been noted already by Silberer. Evidence for this
correspondence is contained in my book, Psychology and Alchemy.
Two years later, in 1946, 1 pursued the matter further in "Psychology
of the Transference,"[14] and finally my researches led to the
Mysterium Coniunetionis.

As with all problems that concerned me personally or scientifically,
that of the coniunctio was accompanied or heralded by dreams. In
one of these dreams both this and the Christ problem were
condensed in a remarkable image.

I dreamed once more that my house had a large wing which I had
never visited. I resolved to look at it, and finally entered. I came to a
big double door. When I opened it, I found myself in a room set up
as a laboratory. In front of the window stood a table covered with
many glass vessels and all the paraphernalia of a zoological
laboratory. This was my father's workroom. However, he was not
there. On shelves along the walls stood hundreds of bottles
containing every imaginable sort offish. I was astonished: so now
my father was going in for ichthyology!

As I stood there and looked around I noticed a curtain which bellied
out from time to time, as though a strong wind were blowing.
Suddenly Hans, a young man from the country, appeared. I told him
to look and see whether a window were open in the room behind
the curtain. He went, and was gone for some time. When he
returned, I saw an expression of terror on his face. He said only,
"Yes, there is something. It's haunted in there!"

Then I myself went, and found a door which led to my mother's

room. There was no one in it. The atmosphere was uncanny. The
room was very large, and suspended from the ceiling were two
rows of five chests each, hanging about two feet above the floor.
They looked like small garden pavilions, each about sixfeet in area,
and each containing two beds. I knew that this was the room where
my mother, who in reality had long been dead, was visited, and that
she had set up these

14 In The Practice of Psychotherapy ( CW 16 ).
15CW14.

beds for visiting spirits to sleep. They were spirits who came in
pairs, ghostly married couples, so to speak, who spent the night or
even the day there.

Opposite my mother's room was a door. I opened it and entered a
vast hall; it reminded me of the lobby of a large hotel. It was fitted
out with easy chairs, small tables, pillars, sumptuous hangings, etc.
A brass band was playing loudly; I had heard music all along in the
background, but without knowing where it came from. There was no
one in the hall except the brass band blaring forth dance tunes and
marches.

The brass band in the hotel lobby suggested ostentatious jollity and
worldliness. No one would have guessed that behind this loud
facade was the other world, also located in the same building. The
dream-image of the lobby was, as it were, a caricature of my
bonhomie or worldly joviality. But this was only the outside aspect;
behind it lay something quite different, which could not be
investigated in the blare of the band music: the fish laboratory and
the hanging pavilions for spirits. Both were awesome places in
which a mysterious silence prevailed. In them I had the feeling: Here
is the dwelling of night; whereas the lobby stood for the daylight
world and its superficiality.

The most important images in the dream were the "reception room
for spirits" and the fish laboratory. The former expresses in
somewhat farcial fashion the coniunctio; the latter indicates my
preoccupation with Christ, who himself is the fish (ichthys). Both
were subjects that were to keep me on the go for more than a
decade.

It is remarkable that the study of fish was attributed to my father. In
the dream he was a caretaker of Christian souls, for, according to
the ancient view, these are fish caught in Peter's net. It is equally
remarkable that in the same dream my mother was a guardian of
departed spirits. Thus both my parents appeared burdened with the
problem of the "cure of souls," which in fact was really my task.
Something had remained unfinished and was still with my parents;
that is to say, it was still latent in the unconscious and hence
reserved for the future. I was being reminded that I had not yet dealt
with the major concern of "philosophical" alchemy, the coniunctio,
and thus had not answered the question which the Christian soul put
to me. Also the major work on the Grail legend, which my wife had
made her life's task, was not completed. [16] I recall how often the
quest for the Grail and the fisher king came to my mind while I was
working on the ichthys symbol in Aion. Had it not been for my
unwillingness to intrude upon my wife's field, I would unquestionably
have had to include the Grail legend in my studies of alchemy.

My memory of my father is of a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas
wound, a "fisher king" whose wound would not heal that Christian
suffering for which the alchemists sought the panacea. I as a
"dumb" Parsifal was the witness of this sickness during the years of
my boyhood, and, like Parsifal, speech failed me. I had only
inklings. In actuality my father had never interested himself in
theriomorphic Christ-symbolism. On the other hand he had literally
lived right up to his death the suffering prefigured and promised by

Christ, without ever becoming aware that this was a consequence
of the imitatio Christi. He regarded his suffering as a personal
affliction for which you might ask a doctor's advice; he did not see it
as the suffering of the Christian in general. The words of Galatians
2:20: "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me," never penetrated his
mind in their full significance, for any thinking about religious
matters sent shudders of horror through him. He wanted to rest
content with faith, but faith broke faith with him. Such is frequently
the reward of the sacrificium intellectus. "Not all men can receive
this precept, but only those to whom it is given.... There are eunuchs
who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of
heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it." (Matthew
19:11f.) Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads
only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

The theriomorphic attributes of the gods show that the gods extend
not only into superhuman regions but also into the

16 After the death of Mrs. Jung in 1955, Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz took up
the work on the Grail and brought it to safe hartrar in 1958. Cf. Emma Jung
and Marie-Louise von Franz: The Grail Legend, trans, by Andrea Dykes,
New York and London, 1930). A. J.

subhuman realm. The animals are their shadows, as it were, which
nature herself associates with the divine image. The "pisciculi
Christianorum" show that those who imitate Christ are themselves
fish that is, unconscious souls who require the cura animarum. The
fish laboratory is a synonym for the ecclesiastical "cure of souls"
And just as the wounder wounds himself, so the healer heals
himself. Significantly, in the dream the decisive activity is carried
out by the dead upon the dead, in the world beyond consciousness,
that is, in the unconscious.

At that stage of my life, therefore, I was still not conscious of an
essential aspect of my task, nor would I have been able to give a

satisfactory interpretation of the dream. I could only sense its
meaning. I still had to overcome the greatest inner resistances
before I could write Answer to Job.

The inner root of this book is to be found in Aion. There I had dealt
with the psychology of Christianity, and Job is a kind of
prefiguration of Christ. The link between them is the idea of
suffering. Christ is the suffering servant of God, and so was Job. In
the case of Christ the sins of the world are the cause of suffering,
and the suffering of the Christian is the general answer. This leads
inescapably to the question: Who is responsible for these sins? In
the final analysis it is God who created the world and its sins, and
who therefore became Christ in order to suffer the fate of humanity.

In Aion there are references to the bright and dark side of the divine
image. I cited the "wrath of God" the commandment to fear God,
and the petition "Lead us not into temptation". The ambivalent God-
image plays a crucial part in the Book of Job. Job expects that God
will, in a sense, stand by him against God; in this we have a picture
of God's tragic ontradictoriness. This was the main theme of
Answer to Job,

There were outside forces, too, which impelled me to write this
book. The many questions from the public and from patients had
made me feel that I must express myself more clearly about the
religious problems of modern man. For years I had hesitated to do
so, because I was fully aware of the storm I would be unleashing.
But at last I could not help being gripped by the problem, in all its
urgency and difficulty, and I found myself compelled to give an
answer. I did so in the form in which the problem had presented
itself to me, that is, as an experience charged with emotion. I chose
this form deliberately, in order to avoid giving the impression that I
was bent on proclaiming some eternal truth. My Answer to Job was
meant to be no more than the utterance of a single individual, who

hopes and expects to arouse some thoughtfulness in his public. I
was far from wanting to enunciate a metaphysical truth. Yet the
theologians tax me with that very thing, because theological thinkers
are so used to dealing with eternal truths that they know no other
kinds. When the physicist says that the atom is of such and such a
composition, and when he sketches a model of it, he too does not
intend to express anything like an eternal truth. But theologians do
not understand the natural sciences and, particularly, psychological
thinking. The material of analytical psychology, its principal facts,
consist of statements of statements that occur frequently in
consistent form at various places and at various times.

The problem of Job in all its ramifications had likewise been
foreshadowed in a dream. It started with my paying a visit to my
long-deceased father. He was living in the country-l did not know
where. I saw a house in the style of the eighteenth century, very
roomy, with several rather large outbuildings. It had originally been, I
learned, an inn at a spa, and it seemed that many great
personages, famous people and princes, had stopped there.
Furthermore, several had died and their sarcophagi were in a crypt
belonging to the house. My father guarded these as custodian.

He was, as I soon discovered, not only the custodian but also a
distinguished scholar in his own right which he had never been in
his lifetime. I met him in his study, and, oddly enough, Dr. Y-who
was about my age and his son, both psychiatrists, were also
present. I do not know whether I had asked a question or whether
my father wanted to explain something of his own accord, but in any
case he fetched a big Bible down from a shelf, a heavy folio volume
like the Merian Bible in my library. The Bible my father held was
bound in shiny fishskin. He opened it at the Old Testament I
guessed that he turned to the Pentateuch and began interpreting a
certain passage. He did this so swiftly and so learnedly that I could
not follow him. I noted only that what he said betrayed a vast amount

of variegated knowledge, the significance of which I dimly
apprehended but could not properly judge or grasp. I saw that Dr. Y
understood nothing at all, and his son began to laugh. They thought
that my father was going off the deep end and what he said was
simply senile prattle. But it was quite clear to me that it was not due
to morbid excitement, and that there was nothing silly about what he
was saying. On the contrary, his argument was so intelligent and so
learned that we in our stupidity simply could not follow it. It dealt with
something extremely important which fascinated him. That was why
he was speaking with such intensity; his mind was flooded with
profound ideas. I was annoyed and thought it was a pity that he had
to talk in the presence of three such idiots as we.

The two psychiatrists represented a limited medical point of view
which, of course, also infects me as a physician. They represent my
shadow first and second editions of the shadow, father and son.

Then the scene changed. My father and Iwere infrontofthe house,
facing a kind of shed where, apparently, wood was stacked. We
heard loud thumps, as if large chunks of wood were being thrown
down or tossed about. I had the impression that at least two
workmen must be busy there, but my father indicated to me that the
place was haunted. Some sort of poltergeists were making the
racket, evidently.

We then entered the house, and I saw that it had very thick walls.
We climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. There a strange
sight presented itself: a large hall which was the exact replica of the
divan-i-kaas (council hall) of Sultan Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a
high, circular room with a gallery running along the wall, from which
four bridges led to a basin- shaped center. The basin rested upon a
huge column and formed the sultan's round seat. From this elevated
place he spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along
the walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It

corresponded precisely to the real divan-i-kaas.

In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep flight of
stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall which no longer
corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs was a small door,
and my father said, "Now I will lead you into the highest presence."
Then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor. I imitated
him, likewise kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could
not bring my forehead quite down to the floor there was perhaps a
millimeter to spare. But at least I had made the gesture with him.
Suddenly I knew perhaps my father had told me that that upper door
led to a solitary chamber where lived Uriah, King David's general,
whom David had shamefully betrayed for the sake of his wife
Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to abandon Uriah in the
face of the enemy.

I must make a few explanatory remarks concerning this dream. The
initial scene describes how the unconscious task which I had left to
my "father," that is, to the unconscious, was working out. He was
obviously engrossed in the Bible-Genesis?-and eager to
communicate his insights. The fishskin marks the Bible as an
unconscious content, for fishes are mute and unconscious. My poor
father does not succeed in communicating either, for the audience
is in part incapable of understanding, in part maliciously stupid.

After this defeat we cross the street to the "other side," where
poltergeists are at work. Poltergeist phenomena usually take place
in the vicinity of young people before puberty; that is to say, lam still
immature and too unconscious. The Indian ambience illustrates the
"other side." When I was in India, the mandala structure of the
divan-i-kaas had in actual fact powerfully impressed me as the
representation of a content related to a center. The center is the
seat of Akbar the Great, who rules over a subcontinent, who is a
"lord of this world," like David. But even higher than David stands

his guiltless victim, his loyal general Uriah, whom he abandoned to
the enemy. Uriah is a prefiguration of Christ, the god-man who was
abandoned by God. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" On top of that, David had "taken unto himself Uriah's wife.
Only later did I understand what this allusion to Uriah signified: not
only was I forced to speak publicly, and very much to my detriment,
about the ambivalence of the God-image in the Old Testament; but
also, my wife would be taken from me by death.

These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious. I
had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my
forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. But
something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept me just a
millimeter away. Something in me was saying, "All very well, but not
entirely." Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a
dumb fish: and if there were not something of the sort in free men,
no Book of Job would have been written several hundred years
before the birth of Christ. Man always has some mental reservation,
even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his
freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not
threaten Him who threatens it?

Uriah, then, lives in a higher place than Akbar. He is even, as the
dream said, the "highest presence," an expression which properly
is used only of God, unless we are dealing in Byzantinisms. I cannot
help thinking here of the Buddha and his relationship to the gods.
For the devout Asiatic, the Tathagata is the All-Highest, the
Absolute. For that reason Hinayana Buddhism has been suspected
of atheism very wrongly so. By virtue of the power of the gods man
is enabled to gain an insight into his Creator. He has even been
given the power to annihilate Creation in its essential aspect, that
is, man's consciousness of the world. Today he can extinguish all
higher life on earth by radioactivity. The idea of world annihilation is
already suggested by the Buddha: by means of enlightenment the

Nidana chain-the chain of causality which leads inevitably to old
age, sickness, and death-can be broken, so that the illusion of
Being comes to an end. Schopenhauer's negation of the Will points
prophetically to a problem of the future that has already come
threatingly close. The dream discloses a thought and a premonition
that have long been present in humanity: the idea of the creature
that surpasses its creator by a small but decisive factor.

After this excursion into the world of dreams, I must once more
come back to my writings. In Aion I embarked upon a cycle of
problems that needed to be dealt with separately. I had attempted
to explain how the appearance of Christ coincided with the
beginning of a new aeon, the age of the Fishes. A synchronicity
exists between the life of Christ and the objective astronomical
event, the entrance of the spring equinox into the sign of Pisces.
Christ is therefore the "Fish" (just as Hammurabi before him was
the "Ram"), and comes forth as the ruler of the new aeon. This led
to the problem of synchronicity, which I discussed in my paper
"Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle."[17]

The Christ problem in Aion finally led me to the question of how the
phenomenon of the Anthropos in psychological terms, the self is
expressed in the experience of the individual. I attempted to give an
answer to this in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins ( 1954 ).[18]
There I was concerned with the interplay between conscious and
unconscious, with the development of consciousness from the
unconscious, and with the impact of the greater personality, the
inner man, upon the life of every individual.

This investigation was rounded out by the Mysterium Coniunctionis,
in which I once again took up the problem of the transference, but
primarily followed my original intention of representing the whole
range of alchemy as a kind of psychology of alchemy, or as an
alchemical basis for depth psychology. In Mysterium Coniunctionis

my psychology was at last given its place in reality and established
upon its historical foundations. Thus my task was finished, my work
done, and now it can stand. The moment I touched bottom, I
reached the bounds of scientific understanding, the transcendental,
the nature of the archetype per se, concerning which no further
scientific statements can be made.

The survey I have given here of my work is, of course, only a brief
summary. I really ought to say a great deal more, or a

17 In C. G. Jung and W. Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche
(New York and London, 1954); also in The Structure and Dynamics of the
Psyche (CW 8).

18 The essays in this book are mostly contained in w>lumes 8, 9 (i), and 11
of the Collected Works.

great deal less. It is an improvisation, like everything I am relating
here. It is born of the moment. Those who know my work may
possibly profit by it; others perhaps will be impelled to look into my
ideas. My life is what I have done, my scientific work; the one is
inseparable from the other. The work is the expression of my inner
development; for commitment to the contents of the unconscious
forms the man and produces his transformations. My works can be
regarded as stations along my life's way.

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their
source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that
assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me
to speak out. I have never counted upon any strong response, any
powerful resonance, to my writings. They represent a compensation
for our times, and I have been impelled to say what no one wants to
hear. For that reason, and especially at the beginning, I often felt
utterly forlorn. I knew that what I said would be unwelcome, for it is
difficult for people of our times to accept the counterweight to the
conscious world. Today I can say that it is truly astonishing that I

have had as much success as has been accorded me far more
than I ever could have expected. I have the feeling that I have done
all that it was possible for me to do. Without a doubt that life work
could have been larger, and could have been done better; but more
was not within my power.

VIM

The Tower

GRADUALLY through my scientific work, I was able to put my
fantasies and the contents of the unconscious on a solid footing.
Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me;
something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of
representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the
knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a
confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the "Tower,"
the house which I built for myself at Bollingen.

It was settled from the start that I would build near the water. I had
always been curiously drawn by the scenic charm of the upper lake
of Zurich, and so in 1922 I bought some land in Bollingen. It is
situated in the area of St. Meinrad and is old church land, having
formerly belonged to the monastery of St. Gall.

At first I did not plan a proper house, but merely a kind of primitive
one-story dwelling. It was to be a round structure with a hearth in the
center and bunks along the walls. I more or less had in mind an
African hut where the fire, ringed by a few stones, burns in the
middle, and the whole life of the family revolves around this center.
Primitive huts concretize an idea ofwholeness, a familial
wholeness in which all sorts of small domestic animals likewise
participate. But I altered the plan even during the first stages of
building, for I felt it was too primitive. I realized it would have to be a
regular two-story house, not a mere hut crouched on the ground. So
in 1923 the first round house was built, and when it was finished I

saw that it had become a suitable dwelling tower.

The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was
intense from the start. It represented for me the maternal hearth. But
I became increasingly aware that it did not yet express everything
that needed saying, that something was still, lacking. And so, four
years later, in 1927, the central structure was added, with a tower-
like annex.

After some time had passed again the interval was four years I
once more had a feeling of incompleteness. The building still
seemed too primitive to me, and so in 1931 the tower-like annex
was extended. I wanted a room in this tower where I could exist for
myself alone. I had in mind what I had seen in Indian houses, in
which there is usually an area though it may be only a corner of a
room separated off by a curtain to which the inhabitants can
withdraw. There they meditate for perhaps a quarter or half an hour,
or do Yoga exercises. Such an area of retirement is essential in
India, where people live crowded very close together.

In my retiring room I am by myself. I keep the key with me all the
time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission. In
the course of the years I have done paintings on the walls, and so
have expressed all those things which have carried me out of time
into seclusion, out of the present into timelessness. Thus the
second tower became for me a place of spiritual concentration.

In 1935, the desire arose in me for a piece of fenced-in land, I
needed a larger space that would stand open to the sky and to
nature. And so-once again after an interval of four years-l added a
courtyard and a loggia by the lake, which formed a fourth element
that was separated from the unitary threeness of the house. Thus a
quaternity had arisen, four different parts of the building, and,
moreover, in the course of twelve years.

After my wife's death in 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become
what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I
suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so
low, so hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the
"maternal" and the "spiritual" towers. So, in that same year, I added
an upper story to this section, which represents myself, or my ego-
personality. Earlier, I would not have been able to do this; I would
have regarded it as presumptuous self-emphasis. Now it signified
an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. With that the
building was complete. I had started the first tower in 1923, two
months after the death of my mother. These two dates are
meaningful because the Tower, as we shall see, is connected with
the dead.

From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of
maturation a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could
become what I was, what I am and will be. It gave me a feeling as if I
were being reborn in stone. It is thus a concretization of the
individuation process, a memorial aere perennius. During the
building work, of course, I never considered these matters. I built the
house in sections, always following the concrete needs of the
moment. It might also be said that I built, it in a kind of dream. Only
afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a
meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.

At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply
myself. Here I am, as it were, the "age-old son of the mother." That
is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the "old man" the "ancient,"
whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2,
who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time
and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took
the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside
things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the
waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the
procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has
not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I
am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is
space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's
hinterland.

I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove
myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water,
and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the
food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to
be simple!

In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live "in
modest harmony with nature. "[1] Thoughts rise to the surface which
reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote
future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play
are close together.

In 1 950 I made a kind of monument out of stone to express what the
Tower means to me. The story of how this stone came to me is a
curious one. I needed stones for building the enclosing wall for the
so-called garden, and ordered them from the quarry near Bollingen.
I was standing by when the mason gave all the measurements to
the owner of the quarry, who wrote them down in his notebook.
When the stones arrived by ship and were unloaded, it turned out
that the cornerstone had altogether the wrong measurements;
instead of a triangular stone, a square block had been sent: a
perfect cube of much larger dimensions than had been ordered,
about twenty inches thick. The mason was furious and told the
barge men to take it right back with them.

But when I saw the stone, I said, "No, that is my stone, I must have
it!" For I had seen at once that it suited me perfectly and that I
wanted to do something with it. Only I did not yet know what.

The first thing that occurred to me was a Latin verse by the
alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova (died 1313). I chiseled this into the
stone; in translation it goes:

1 Tide of an old Chinese woodcut showing a little old man in a heroic
landscape.

Here stands the mean, uncomely stone,
"Ts very cheap in price!
The more it is despised by fools,
The more loved by the wise.

This verse refers to the alchemist's stone, the lapis, which is
despised and rejected.

Soon something else emerged. I began to see on the front face, in
the natural structure of the stone, a small circle, a sort of eye, which
looked at me. I chiseled it into the stone, and in the center made a
tiny homunculus. This corresponds to the "little doll" (pupilla)
yourself which you see in the pupil of another's eye; a kind of Kabir,
or the Telesphoros of Asklepios. Ancient statues show him wearing
a hooded cloak and carrying a lantern. At the same time he is a
pointer of the way. I dedicated a few words to him which came into
my mind while I was working. The inscription is in Greek; the
translation goes:

Time is a child playing like a child playing a board game the
kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the
dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths.
He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of
dreams. [2]

These words came to me one after the other while I worked on the
stone.

On the third face, the one facing the lake, I let the stone itself speak,
as it were, in a Latin inscription. These sayings are more or less
quotations from alchemy. This is the translation:

I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am
one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the
same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have
had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone
from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the
innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not
touched by the cycle of aeons.

2 The first sentence is a fragment from Heraclitus; the second sentence
alludes to the Mithras liturgy, and the last sentence to Homer (Odyssey,
Book 24, verse 12),

In conclusion, under the saying of Arnaldus de Villanova, I set down
in Latin the words "In remembrance of his seventy-fifth birthday C.
G. Jung made and placed this here as a thanks offering, in the year
1950."

When the stone was finished, I looked at it again and again,
wondering about it and asking myself what lay behind my impulse to
carve it.

The stone stands outside the Tower, and is like an explanation of it.
It is a manifestation of the occupant, but one which remains
incomprehensible to others. Do you know what I wanted to chisel
into the back face of the stone? "Le cri de Merlin!" For what the
stone expressed reminded me of Merlin's life in the forest, after he
had vanished from the world. Men still hear his cries, so the legend

runs, but they cannot understand or interpret them.

Merlin represents an attempt by the medieval unconscious to create
a parallel f gure to Parsifal. Parsifal is a Christian hero, and Merlin,
son of the devil and a pure virgin, is his dark brother. In the twelfth
century, when the legend arose, there were as yet no premises by
which his intrinsic meaning could be understood. Hence he ended
in exile, and hence "le cri de Merlin" which still sounded from the
forest after his death. This cry that no one could understand implies
that he lives on in unredeemed form. His story is not yet finished,
and he still walks abroad. It might be said that the secret of Merlin
was carried on by alchemy, primarily in the figure of Mercurius.
Then Merlin was taken up again in my psychology of the
unconscious and remains uncomprehended to this dayl That is
because most people find it quite beyond them to live on close
terms with the unconscious. Again and again I have had to learn
how hard this is for people.

I was in Bollingen just as the first tower was being finished. This
was the winter of 1 923-24. As far as I can recall, there was no snow
on the ground; perhaps it was early spring. I had been alone
perhaps for a week, perhaps longer. An indescribable stillness
prevailed.

One evening I can still remember it precisely I was sitting by the
fireplace and had put a big kettle on the fire to make hot water for
washing up. The water began to boil and the kettle to sing. It
sounded like many voices, or stringed instruments, or even like a
whole orchestra. It was just like polyphonic music, which in reality I
cannot abide, though in this case it seemed to me peculiarly
interesting. It was as though there were one orchestra inside the
Tower and another one outside. Now one dominated, now the
other, as though they were responding to each other,

I sat and listened, fascinated. For far more than an hour I listened to
the concert, to this natural melody. It was soft music, containing, as
well, all the discords of nature. And that was right, for nature is not
only harmonious; she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic.
The music was that way too: an out-pouring of sounds, having the
quality of water and of wind so strange that it is simply impossible
to describe it.

On another such still night when I was alone in Bollingen (it was in
the late winter or early spring of 1 924) I awoke to the sound of soft
footsteps going around the Tower. Distant music sounded, coming
closer and closer, and then I heard voices laughing and talking. I
thought, 'Who can be prowling around? What is this all about?
There is only the little footpath along the lake, and scarcely anybody
ever walks on it!" While I was thinking these things I became wide
awake, and went to the window. I opened the shutters all was still.
There was no one in sight, nothing to be heard no wind nothing
nothing at all.

"This is really strange," I thought. I was certain that the footsteps, the
laughter and talk, had been real. But apparently I had only been
dreaming. I returned to bed-and mulled over the way we can
deceive ourselves after all, and what might have been the cause of
such a strange dream. In the midst of this, I fell asleep again-and at
once the same dream began: once more I heard footsteps, talk,
laughter, music. At the same time I had a visual image of several
hundred dark-clad figures, possibly peasant boys in their Sunday
clothes, who had come down from the mountains and were pouring
in around the Tower, on both sides, with a great deal of loud
trampling, laughing, singing, and playing of accordions. Irritably, I
thought, "This is really the limit! I thought it was a dream and now it
turns out to be reality!" At this point, I woke up. Once again I jumped
up, opened the window and shutters, and found everything just the
same as before: a deathly still moonlit night. Then I thought: "Why,

this is simply a case of haunting!"

Naturally I asked myself what it meant when a dream was so
insistent on its reality and at the same time on my being awake.
Usually we experience that only when we see a ghost. Being awake
means perceiving reality. The dream therefore represented a
situation equivalent to reality, in which it created a kind of wakened
state. In this sort of dream, as opposed to ordinary dreams, the
unconscious seems bent on conveying a powerful impression of
reality to the dreamer, an impression which is emphasized by
repetition. The sources of such realities are known to be physical
sensations on the one hand, and archetypal figures on the other.

That night everything was so completely real, or at least seemed to
be so, that I could scarcely sort out the two realities. Nor could I
make anything of the dream itself. What was the meaning of these
music-making peasant boys passing by in a long procession? It
seemed to me they had come out of curiosity, in order to look at the
Tower.

Never again did I experience or dream anything similar, and I
cannot recall ever having heard of a parallel to it. It was only much
later that I found an explanation. This was when I came across the
seventeenth-century Lucerne chronicle by Rennward Cysat. He tells
the following story: On a high pasture of Mount Pilatus, which is
particularly notorious for spooks it is said that Wotan to this day
practices his magic arts there Cysat, while climbing the mountain,
was disturbed one night by a procession of men who poured past
his hut on both sides, playing music and singing precisely what I
had experienced at the Tower.

The next morning Cysat asked the herdsman with whom he had
spent that night what could have been the meaning of it. The man
had a ready explanation: those must be the departed folk— salig Lut,

in Swiss dialect; the phrase also means blessed folk namely,
Wotan's army of departed souls. These, he said, were in the habit
of walking abroad and showing themselves.

It may be suggested that this is a phenomenon of solitude, the
outward emptiness and silence being compensated by the image
of a crowd of people. This would put it in the same class with the
hallucinations of hermits, which are likewise compensatory. But do
we know what realities such stories may be founded on? It is also
possible that I had been so sensitized by the solitude that I was able
to perceive the procession of "departed folk" who passed by.

The explanation of this experience as a psychic compensation
never entirely satisfied me, and to say that it was a hallucination
seemed to me to beg the question. I felt obliged to consider the
possibility of its reality, especially in view of the seventeenth-century
account which had come my way.

It would seem most likely to have been a synchronistic
phenomenon. Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or
visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.
There actually existed, as I discovered, a real parallel to my
experience. In the Middle Ages just such gatherings of young men
took place. These were the Reislaufer (mercenaries) who usually
assembled in spring, marched from Central Switzerland to Locarno,
met at the Casa di Ferro in Minusio and then marched on together
to Milan. In Italy they served as soldiers, fighting for foreign princes.
My vision, therefore, might have been one of these gatherings
which took place regularly each spring when the young men, with
singing and jollity, bade farewell to their native land.

When we began to build at Bollingen in 1923, my eldest daughter
came to see the spot, and exclaimed, "What, you're building here?
There are corpses about!" Naturally I thought, "Ridiculous! Nothing

of the sort!" But when we were constructing the annex four years
later, we did come upon a skeleton. It lay at a depth of seven feet in
the ground. An old rifle bullet was imbedded in the elbow. From
various indications it seemed evident that the body had been
thrown into the grave in an advanced state of decay. It belonged to
one of the many dozens of French soldiers who were drowned in
the Linth in 1799 and were later washed up on the shores of the
Upper Lake. These men were drowned when the Austrians blew up
the bridge of Grynau which the French were storming. A photograph
of the open grave with the skeleton and the date of its discovery
August 22, 1927 is preserved at the Tower.

I arranged a regular burial on my property, and fired a gun three
times over the soldier's grave. Then I set up a gravestone with an
inscription for him. My daughter had sensed the presence of the
dead body. Her power to sense such things is something she
inherits from my grandmother on my mother's side.

In the winter of 1955-56 I chiseled the names of my paternal
ancestors on three stone tablets and placed them in the court- yard
of the Tower. I painted the ceiling with motifs from my own and my
wife's arms, and from those of my sons-in-law. The Jung family
originally had a phoenix for its arms, the bird obviously being
connected with "young," "youth," "rejuvenation." My grandfather
changed the elements of the arms, probably out of a spirit of
resistance toward his father. He was an ardent Freemason and
Grand Master of the Swiss lodge. This had a good deal to do with
the changes he made in the armorial bearings. I mention this point,
in itself of no consequence, because it belongs in the historical
nexus of my thinking and my life.

In keeping with this revision of my grandfather's, my coat of arms no
longer contains the original phoenix. Instead there is a cross azure
in chief dexter and in base sinister a blue bunch of grapes in a field

d'or; separating these is an estoile d'or in a fess azure. [3] The
symbolism of these arms is Masonic, or Rosicrucian. Just as cross
and rose represent the Rosicrucian problem of opposites ("per
crucem ad rosam"), that is, the Christian and Dionysian elements,
so cross and grapes are symbols of the heavenly and the chthonic
spirit. The uniting symbol is the gold star, the aurum philosophorum.

3 Translated from the language of heraldry: a blue cross in the upper right
and blue grapes in the lower left in a field of gold; a blue bar with a gold star.

The Rosicrucians derived from Hermetic or alchemical philosophy.
One of their founders was Michael Maier ( 1568-1622), a well-
known alchemist and younger contemporary of the relatively
unknown but more important Gerardus Dorneus (end ofthe
sixteenth century), whose treatises fill the first volume of the
Theatrum Chemicum of 1602. The two men lived in Frankfurt, which
seems to have been a center of alchemical philosophy at the time.
In any case, as Count Palatine and court physician to Rudolph II,
Michael Maier was something of a local celebrity. In neighboring
Mainz at that time lived Dr. med. et. jur. Carl Jung (died 1654), of
whom nothing else is known, since the family tree breaks off with
my great-great-grandfather who lived at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. This was Sigmund Jung, a civis Moguntinus,
citizen of Mainz. The hiatus is due to the fact that the municipal
archives of Mainz were burned in the course of a siege during the
War of the Spanish Succession. It is a safe surmise that this
evidently learned Dr. Carl Jung was familiar with the writings of the
two alchemists, for the pharmacology of the day was still very much
under the influence of Paracelsus. Dorneus was an outspoken
Paracelsist and even composed a voluminous commentary on the
Paracelsan treatise, De Vita Longa. He also, more than all the
other alchemists, dealt with the process of individuation. In view of
the fact that a large part of my life work has revolved around the
study of the problem of opposites, and especially their alchemical

symbolism, all this is not without a certain interest.

When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the
fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I
am under the influence of things or questions which were left
incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and
more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an
impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents
to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer
questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had
not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps
continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult
to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or
more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is
the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always
appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give
the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the
personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but
such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be
secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the
social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be
sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective
situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little
into account.

Like anyone who is capable of some introspection, I had early
taken it for granted that the split in my personality was my own
purely personal affair and responsibility. Faust, to be sure, had
made the problem somewhat easier for me by confessing, "Two
souls, alas, are housed within my breast"; but he had thrown no light
on the cause of this dichotomy. His insight seemed, in a sense,
directed straight at me. In the days when I first read Faust I could not
remotely guess the extent to which Goethe's strange heroic myth
was a collective experience and that it prophetically anticipated the

fate of the Germans. Therefore I felt personally implicated, and
when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of
Philemon and Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had
helped commit the murder of the two old people. This strange idea
alarmed me, and I regarded it as my responsibility to atone for this
crime, or to prevent its repetition.

My false conclusion was further supported by a bit of odd
information that I picked up during those early years, I heard that it
had been bruited about that my grandfather Jung had been an
illegitimate son of Goethe's. [4] This annoying story made an
impression upon me insofar as it at once corroborated and
seemed to explain my curious reactions to Faust. It is true that I did
not believe in reincarnation, but I was instinctively familiar with that
concept which the Indians call karma. Since in those days I had no
idea of the existence of the unconscious, I could not have had any
psychological understanding of my reactions. I also did not know no
more than, even today, it is generally known that the future is
unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be
guessed by clairvoyants. Thus, when the news arrived of the
crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I at Versailles, Jakob Burckhardt
exclaimed, "That is the doom of Germany." The archetypes of
Wagner were already knocking at the gates, and along with them
came the Dionysian experience of Nietzsche which might better be
ascribed to the god of ecstasy, Wotan. The hubris of the Wilhelmine
era alienated Europe and paved the way for the disaster of 1914.

4 See above, Chap. II, n. i, pp. 35-36.

In my youth (around 1890) I was unconsciously caught up by this
spirit of the age, and had no methods at hand for extricating myself
from it. Faust struck a chord in me and pierced me through in a way
that I could not but regard as personal. Most of all, it awakened in
me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter,

of light and darkness, Faust, the inept, purblind philosopher,
encounters the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow,
Mephistopheles, who in spite of his negating disposition represents
the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar who hovers on the
brink of suicide. My own inner contradictions appeared here in
dramatized form; Goethe had written virtually a basic outline and
pattern of my own conflicts and solutions. The dichotomy of Faust-
Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person,
and I was that person. In other words, I was directly struck, and
recognized that this was my fate. Hence, all the crises of the drama
affected me personally; at one point I had passionately to agree, at
another to oppose. No solution could be a matter of indifference to
me. Later I consciously linked my work to what Faust had passed
over: respect for the eternal rights of man, recognition of "the
ancient," and the continuity of culture and intellectual history.[5]

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual
elements which were all already present in the ranks of our an-
cestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly
varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul
therefore have an intensely historical character and find no

5 Jung's attitude is shown in the inscription he placed o\sr the gate of the
Tower: Philemonis Sacrum Fausti Poenftentia (Shrine of Philemon
Repentance of Faust) . When the gate was walled up, he put the same
words abo\e the entrance to the second tower. A. J.

proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into
being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at
home in such things. We are very far from having finished
completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity,
as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged
down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with
ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the

past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no
stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of
connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to
the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that
we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden
age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary
background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into
novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency dissatisfaction,
and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on
promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the
darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper
sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased
at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of
greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the
state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant
discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what
our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand
ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of
his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in
the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of
course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and
in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the
contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are
deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications
which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with
less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est all
haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less
expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the
simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest
use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly timesaving

innovations.

In this book I have devoted considerable space to my subjective
view of the world, which, however, is, not a product of rational
thinking. It is rather a vision such as will come to one who
undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat
closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being. If our
impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of
the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches
listen to and understand the present in other words, how our
unconscious is responding to it. Thus we remain ignorant of
whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification
in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and
contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the
historical family which is inherent in the individual can be
harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.

In the Tower at Bollingen it is as if one lived in many centuries
simultaneously. The place will outlive me, and in its location and
style it points backward to things of long ago. There is very little
about it to suggest the present. If a man of the sixteenth century
were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamp and the
matches would be new to him; otherwise, he would know his way
about without difficulty. There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither
electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestors' souls are
sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them
the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough
answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as
if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were
peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see
life in the round, as something forever coming into being and
passing on.

IX

Travels

i. NORTH AFRICA

AT THE BEGINNING of 1920 a friend told me that he had a
business trip to make to Tunis, and would I like to accompany him?
I said yes immediately. We set out in March, going first to Algiers.
Following the coast, we reached Tunis and from there Sousse,
where I left my friend to his business affairs.

At last I was where I had longed to be: in a non-European country
where no European language was spoken and no Christian
conceptions prevailed, where a different race lived and a different
historical tradition and philosophy had set its stamp upon the face
of the crowd. I had often wished to be able for once to see the
European from outside, his image reflected back at him by an
altogether foreign milieu. To be sure, there was my ignorance of the
Arabic language, which I deeply regretted; but to make up for this I
was all the more attentive in observing the people and their
behavior. Frequently I sat for hours in an Arab coffee house,
listening to conversations of which I understood not a word. But I
studied the people's gestures, and especially their expression of
emotions; I observed the subtle change in their gestures when they
spoke with a European, and thus learned to see to some extent with
different eyes and to know the white man outside his own
environment.

What the Europeans regard as Oriental calm and apathy seemed

to me a mask; behind it I sensed a restlessness, a degree of
agitation, which I could not explain. Strangely, in setting foot upon
Moorish soil, I found myself haunted by an impression which I myself
could not understand: I kept thinking that the land smelled queer. It
was the smell of blood, as though the soil were soaked with blood.
This strip of land, it occurred to me, had already borne the brunt of
three civilizations: Carthaginian, Roman, and Christian. What the
technological age will do with Islam remains to be seen.

When I left Sousse, I traveled south to Sfax, and thence into the
Sahara, to the oasis city of Tozeur. The city lies on a slight
elevation, on the margin of a plateau, at whose foot lukewarm,
slightly saline springs well up profusely and irrigate the oasis
through a thousand little canals. Towering date palms formed a
green, shady roof overhead, under which peach, apricot, and fig
trees flourished, and beneath these alfalfa of an unbelievable green.
Several kingfishers, shining like jewels, flitted through the foliage. In
the comparative coolness of this green shade strolled figures clad
in white, among them a great number of affectionate couples
holding one another in close embrace obviously homosexual
friendships. I felt suddenly transported to the times of classical
Greece, where this inclination formed the cement of a society of
men and of the polls based on that society. It was clear that men
spoke to men and women to women here. Only a few of the latter
were to be seen, nunlike, heavily veiled figures. I saw a few without
veils. These, my dragoman explained, were prostitutes. On the
main streets the scene was dominated by men and children.

My dragoman confirmed my impression of the prevalence of
homosexuality, and of its being taken for granted, and promptly
made me offers. The good fellow could have no notion of the
thoughts which had struck me like a flash of lightning, suddenly
illuminating my point of observation. I felt cast back many centuries
to an infinitely more naive world of adolescents who were

preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to
emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness, in which
they had existed from time immemorial, and to become aware of
their own existence, in self-defense against the forces threatening
them from the North.

While I was still caught up in this dream of a static, age-old
existence, I suddenly thought of my pocket watch, the symbol of the
European's accelerated tempo. This, no doubt, was the dark cloud
that hung threateningly over the heads of these unsuspecting souls.
They suddenly seemed to me like game who do not see the hunter
but, vaguely uneasy, scent him~"him" being the god of time who will
inevitably chop into the bits and pieces of days, hours, minutes, and
seconds that duration which is still the closest thing to eternity.

From Tozeur I went on to the oasis of Nefta. I rode off with my
dragoman early in the morning, shortly after sunrise. Our mounts
were large, swift-footed mules, on which we made rapid progress.
As we approached the oasis, a single rider, wholly swathed in
white, came toward us. With proud bearing he rode by without
offering us any greeting, mounted on a black mule whose harness
was banded and studded with silver. He made an impressive,
elegant figure. Here was a man who certainly possessed no pocket
watch, let alone a wrist watch; for he was obviously and unself-
consciously the person he had always been. He lacked that faint
note of foolishness which clings to the European. The European is,
to be sure, convinced that he is no longer what he was ages ago;
but he does not know what he has since become. His watch tells
him that since the "Middle Ages" time and its synonym, progress,
have crept up on him and irrevocably taken something from him.
With lightened baggage he continues his journey, with steadily
increasing velocity, toward nebulous goals. He compensates for the
loss of gravity and the corresponding sentiment "incompletitude by

the illusion of his triumphs, such as steamships, railroads,
airplanes, and rockets, that rob him of his duration and transport
him into another reality of speeds and explosive accelerations.

The deeper we penetrated into the Sahara, the more time slowed
down for me; it even threatened to move backward. The
shimmering heat waves rising up contributed a good deal to my
dreamy state, and when we reached the first palms and dwellings of
the oasis, it seemed to me that everything here was exactly the way
it should be and the way it had always been.

Early the next morning I was awakened by the various unfamiliar
noises outside my inn. There was a large open square which had
been empty the night before, but which was now crowded with
people, camels, mules, and donkeys. The camels groaned and
announced in manifold variations of tone their chronic discontent,
and the donkeys competed with cacophonous screams. The
people ran around in a great state of excitement, shouting and
gesticulating. They looked savage and rather alarming. My
dragoman explained that a great festival was being celebrated that
day. Several desert tribes had come in during the night to do two
days of field work for the marabout. The marabout was the
administrator of poor relief and owned many fields in the oasis. The
people were to lay out a new field and irrigation canals to match.

At the farther end of the square there suddenly rose a cloud of dust;
a green flag unfolded, and drums rolled. At the head of a long
procession of hundreds of wild-looking men carrying baskets and
short, wide hoes appeared a white-bearded, venerable old man.
He radiated inimitable natural dignity, as though he were a hundred
years old. This was the marabout, astride a white mule. The men
danced around him, beating small drums. The scene was one of
wild excitement, hoarse shouting, dust, and heat. With fanatic
purposefulness the procession swarmed by, out into the oasis, as if

going to battle.

I followed this horde at a cautious distance, and my dragoman
made no attempt to encourage me to approach closer until we
reached the spot where the "work" was going on. Here, if possible,
even greater excitement prevailed; people were beating drums and
shouting wildly; the site of the work resembled a disturbed anthill;
everything was being done with the utmost haste. Carrying their
baskets filled with heavy loads of earth, men danced along to the
rhythm of the drums; others hacked into the ground at a furious rate,
digging ditches and erecting dams. Through this wild tumult the
marabout rode along on his white mule, evidently issuing
instructions with the dignified, mild, and weary gestures of
advanced age. Wherever he came, the haste, shouting, and rhythm
intensified, forming the background against which the calm figure of
the holy man stood out with extraordinary effectiveness. Toward
evening the crowd was visibly overcome by exhaustion; the men
soon dropped down beside their camels into deep sleep. During
the night, after the usual stupendous concert of the dogs, utter
stillness prevailed, until at the first rays of the rising sun the
invocation of the muezzin which always deeply stirred me
summoned the people to their morning prayer.

This scene taught me something: these people live from their
affects, are moved and have their being in emotions. Their
consciousness takes care of their 'orientation in space and
transmits impressions from outside, and it is also stirred by inner
impulses and affects. But it is not given to reflection; the ego has
almost no autonomy. The situation is not so different with the
European; but we are, after all, somewhat more complicated. At
any rate the European possesses a certain measure of will and
directed intention. What we lack is intensity of life.

Without wishing to fall under the spell of the primitive, I nevertheless

had been psychically infected. This manifested itself outwardly in an
infectious enteritis which cleared up after a few days, thanks to the
local treatment of rice water and calomel.

Overcharged with ideas, I finally went back to Tunis. The night
before we embarked from Marseilles I had a dream which, I
sensed, summed up the whole experience. This was just as it
should be, for I had accustomed myself to living always on two
planes simultaneously, one conscious, which attempted to
understand and could not, and one unconscious, which wanted to
express something and could not formulate it any better than by a
dream.

I dreamt that I was in an Arab city, and as in most such cities there
was a citadel, a casbah. The city was situated in a broad plain, and
had a wall all around it. The shape of the wall was square, and there
were four gates.

The casbah in the interior of the city was surrounded by a wide
moat (which is not the way it really is in Arab countries). I stood
before a wooden bridge leading over the water to a dark,
horseshoe-shaped portal, which was open. Eager to see the citadel
from the inside also, I stepped out on the bridge. When I was about
halfway across it, a handsome, dark Arab of aristocratic, almost
royal bearing came toward me from the gate. I knew that this youth
in the white burnoose was the resident prince of the citadel. When
he came up to me, he attacked me and tried to knock me down.
We wrestled. In the struggle we crashed against the railing; it gave
way and both of us fell into the moat, where he tried to push my
head under water to drown me. No, I thought, this is going too far.
And in my turn I pushed his head under water. I did so although I felt
great admiration for him; but I did not want to let myself be killed. I
had no intention of killing him; I wanted only to make him
unconscious and incapable of fighting.

Then the scene of the dream changed, and he was with me in a
large vaulted octagonal room in the center of the citadel. The room
was all white, very plain and beautiful. Along the light-colored
marble walls stood low divans, and before me on the floor lay an
open book with black letters written in magnificent calligraphy on
milky-white parchment. It was not Arabic script; rather, it looked to
me like the Uigurian script of West Turkestan, which was familiar to
me from the Manichaean fragments from Turfan. I did not know the
contents, but nevertheless I had the feeling that this was "my book,"
that I had written it. The young prince with whom I had just been
wrestling sat to the right of me on the floor. I explained to him that
now that I had overcome him he must read the book. But he
resisted. I placed my arm around his shoulders and forced him, with
a sort of paternal kindness and patience, to read the book. I knew
that this was absolutely essential, and at last he yielded.

In this dream, the Arab youth was the double of the proud Arab who
had ridden past us without a greeting. As an inhabitant of the
casbah he was a figuration of the self, or rather, a messenger or
emissary of the self. For the casbah from which he came was a
perfect mandala: a citadel surrounded by a square wall with four
gates. His attempt to kill me was an echo of the motif of Jacob's
struggle with the angel; he was to use the language of the Bible like
an angel of the Lord, a messenger of God who wished to kill men
because he did not know them.

Actually, the angel ought to have had his dwelling in me. But he
knew only angelic truth and understood nothing about man.
Therefore he first came forward as my enemy; however, I held my
own against him. In the second part of the dream I was the master
of the citadel; he sat at my feet and had to learn to understand my
thoughts, or rather, learn to know man.

Obviously, my encounter with Arab culture had struck me with
overwhelming force. The emotional nature of these unreflective
people who are so much closer to life than we are exerts a strong
suggestive influence upon those historical layers in ourselves which
we have just overcome and left behind, or which we think we have
overcome. It is like the paradise of childhood from which we
imagine we have emerged, but which at the slightest provocation
imposes fresh defeats upon us. Indeed, our cult of progress is in
danger of imposing on us even more childish dreams of the future,
the harder it presses us to escape from the past.

On the other hand, a characteristic of childhood is that, thanks to its
naivete and unconsciousness, it sketches a more complete picture
of the self, of the whole man in his pure individuality, than adulthood.
Consequently, the sight of a child or a primitive will arouse certain
longings in adult, civilized persons longings which relate to the
unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which
have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted
persona.

In traveling to Africa to f nd a psychic observation post outside the
sphere of the European, I unconsciously wanted to find that part of
my personality which had become invisible under the influence and
the pressure of being European. This part stands in unconscious
opposition to myself, and indeed I attempt to suppress it. In keeping
with its nature, it wishes to make me unconscious (force me under
water) so as to kill me; but my aim is, through insight, to make it
more conscious, so that we can find a common modus vivendi. The
Arab's dusky complexion marks him as a "shadow," but not the
personal shadow, rather an ethnic one associated not with my
persona but with the totality of my personality, that is, with the self.
As master of the casbah, he must be regarded as a kind of shadow
of the self. The predominantly rationalistic European finds much that
is human alien to him, and he prides himself on this without realizing

that his rationality is won at the expense of his vitality, and that the
primitive part of his personality is consequently condemned to a
more or less underground existence.

The dream reveals how my encounter with North Africa affected me.
First of all there was the danger that my European consciousness
would be overwhelmed by an unexpectedly violent assault of the
unconscious psyche. Consciously, I was not a bit aware of any such
situation; on the contrary, I could not help feeling superior because I
was reminded at every step of my Europeanism. That was
unavoidable; my being European gave me a certain perspective on
these people who were so differently constituted from myself, and
utterly marked me off from them. But I was not prepared for the
existence of unconscious forces within myself which would take the
part of these strangers with such intensity, so that a violent conflict
ensued. The dream expressed this conflict in the symbol of an
attempted murder.

I was not to recognize the real nature of this disturbance until some
years later, when I stayed in tropical Africa. It had been, in fact, the
first hint of "going black under the skin," a spiritual peril which
threatens the uprooted European in Africa to an extent not fully
appreciated. "Where danger is, there is salvation also" these words
of Holderlin often came to my mind in such situations. The salvation
lies in our ability to bring the unconscious urges to consciousness
with the aid of warning dreams. These dreams show that there is
something in us which does not merely submit passively to the
influence of the unconscious, but on the contrary rushes eagerly to
meet it, identifying itself with the shadow. Just as a childhood
memory can suddenly take possession of consciousness with so
lively an emotion that we feel wholly transported back to the original
situation, so these seemingly alien and wholly different Arab
surroundings awaken an archetypal memory of an only too well

known prehistoric past which apparently we have entirely forgotten.
We are remembering a potentiality of life which has been
overgrown by civilization, but which in certain places is still existent.
If we were to relive it naively, it would constitute a relapse into
barbarism. Therefore we prefer to forget it. But should it appear to
us again in the form of a conflict, then we should keep it in our
consciousness and test the two possibilities against each other the
life we live and the one we have forgotten. For what has apparently
been lost does not come to the fore again without sufficient reason.
In the living psychic structure, nothing takes place in a merely
mechanical fashion; everything fits into the economy of the whole,
relates to the whole. That is to say, it is all purposeful and has
meaning. But because consciousness never has a view of the
whole, it usually cannot understand this meaning. We must therefore
content ourselves for the time being with noting the phenomenon
and hoping that the future, or further investigation, will reveal the
significance of this clash with the shadow of the self. In any case, I
did not at the time have any glimmering of the nature of this
archetypal experience, and knew still less about the historical
parallels. Yet though I did not then grasp the full meaning of the
dream, it lingered in my memory, along with the liveliest wish to go
to Africa again at the next opportunity. That wish was not to be
fulfilled for another five years.

/'/'. AMERICA: THE PUEBLO INDIANS

(Extract from an unpublished MS.)

We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply
the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by
the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved
than in any other science. How, for example, can we become
conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the
opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it

from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another
nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the
foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of
assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which
constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything
that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of
ourselves. I understand England only when I see where I, as a
Swiss, do not fit in. I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only
when I see where I as a European do not fit into the world. Through
my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in
America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the
European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be
nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to
look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper. When I
contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the
Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the
same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modern times,
I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still
caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white
man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical
comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.

On my next trip to the United States I went with a group of American
friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city- building Pueblos.
"City," however, is too strong a word. What they build are in reality
only villages; but their crowded houses piled one atop the other
suggest the word "city," as do their language and their whole
manner. There for the first time I had the good fortune to talk with a
non-European, that is, to a non-white. He was a chief of the Taos
pueblos, an intelligent man between the ages of forty and fifty. His
name was Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake). I was able to talk with
him as I have rarely been able to talk with a European. To be sure,
he was caught up in his world just as much as a European is in his,

but what a world it was! In talk with a European, one is constantly
running up on the sand bars of things long known but never
understood; with this Indian, the vessel floated freely on deep, alien
seas. At the same time, one never knows which is more enjoyable:
catching sight of new shores, or discovering new approaches to
age-old knowledge that has been almost forgotten.

"See," Ochwiay Biano said, "how cruel the whites look. Their lips
are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by
folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always
seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always
want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not
know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that
they are mad."

I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.

"They say that they think with their heads," he replied.

"Why of course. What do you think with?" I asked him in surprise.

"We think here," he said, indicating his heart.

I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so it seemed
to me, someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man. It
was as though until now I had seen nothing but sentimental,
prettified color prints. This Indian had struck our vulnerable spot,
unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt rising within me like a
shapeless mist something unknown and yet deeply familiar. And out
of this mist, image upon image detached itself: first Roman legions
smashing into the cities of Gaul, and the keenly incised features of
Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, and Pompey. I saw the Roman
eagle on the North Sea and on the banks of the White Nile. Then I
saw St. Augustine transmitting the Christian creed to the Britons on

the tips of Roman lances, and Charlemagne's most glorious forced
conversions of the heathen; then the pillaging and murdering bands
of the Crusading armies. With a secret stab I realized the
hollowness of that old romanticism about the Crusades. Then
followed Columbus, Cortes, and the other conquistadors who with
fire, sword, torture, and Christianity came down upon even these
remote pueblos dreaming peacefully in the Sun, their Father. I saw,
too, the peoples of the Pacific islands decimated by firewater,
syphilis, and scarlet fever carried in the clothes the missionaries
forced on them.

It was enough. What we from our point of view call colonization,
missions to the heathen, spread of civilization, etc., has another
face the face of a bird of prey seeking with cruel intentness for
distant quarry a face worthy of a race of pirates and highwaymen.
All the eagles and other predatory creatures that adorn our coats of
arms seem to me apt psychological representatives of our true
nature.

Something else that Ochwiay Biano said to me stuck in my mind. It
seems to me so intimately connected with the peculiar atmosphere
of our interview that my account would be incomplete if I failed to
mention it. Our conversation took place on the roof of the fifth story
of the main building. At frequent intervals figures of other Indians
could be seen on the roofs, wrapped in their woolen blankets, sunk
in contemplation of the wandering sun that daily rose into a clear
sky. Around us were grouped the low-built square buildings of air-
dried brick (adobe), with the characteristic ladders that reach from
the ground to the roof, or from roof to roof of the higher stories. (In
earlier, dangerous times the entrance used to be through the roof.)
Before us the rolling plateau of Taos (about seven thousand feet
above sea level) stretched to the horizon, where several conical
peaks (ancient volcanoes) rose to over twelve thousand feet.
Behind us a clear stream purled past the houses, and on its

opposite bank stood a second pueblo of reddish adobe houses,
built one atop the other toward the center of the settlement, thus
strangely anticipating the perspective of an American metropolis
with its skyscrapers in the center. Perhaps half an hour's journey
upriver rose a mighty isolated mountain, the mountain, which has no
name. The story goes that on days when the mountain is wrapped
in clouds the men vanish in that direction to perform mysterious
rites.

The Pueblo Indians are unusually closemouthed, and in matters of
their religion absolutely inaccessible. They make it a policy to keep
their religious practices a secret, and this secret is so strictly
guarded that I abandoned as hopeless any attempt at direct
questioning. Never before had I run into such an atmosphere of
secrecy; the religions of civilized nations today are all accessible;
their sacraments have long ago ceased to be mysteries. Here,
however, the air was filled with a secret known to all the
communicants, but to which whites could gain no access. This
strange situation gave me an inkling of Eleusis, whose secret was
known to one nation and yet never betrayed. I understood what
Pausanias or Herodotus felt when he wrote:

"I am not permitted to name the name of that god." This was not, I
felt, mystification, but a vital mystery whose betrayal might bring
about the downfall of the community as well as of the individual.
Preservation of the secret gives the Pueblo Indian pride and the
power to resist the dominant whites. It gives him cohesion and unity;
and I feel sure that the Pueblos as an individual community will
continue to exist as long as their mysteries are not desecrated.

It was astonishing to me to see how the Indian's emotions change
when he speaks of his religious ideas. In ordinary life he shows a
degree of self-control and dignity that borders on fatalistic
equanimity. But when he speaks of things that pertain to his

mysteries, he is in the grip of a surprising emotion which he cannot
conceal a fact which greatly helped to satisfy my curiosity. As I have
said, direct questioning led to nothing. When, therefore, I wanted to
know about essential matters, I made tentative remarks and
observed my interlocutor's expression for those affective
movements which are so very familiar to me. If I had hit on
something essential, he remained silent or gave an evasive reply,
but with all the signs of profound emotion; frequently tears would fill
his eyes. Their religious conceptions are not theories to them
(which, indeed, would have to be very curious theories to evoke
tears from a man), but facts, as important and moving as the
corresponding external realities.

As I sat with Ochwiay Biano on the roof, the blazing sun rising
higher and higher, he said, pointing to the sun, "Is not he who
moves there our father? How can anyone say differently? How can
there be another god? Nothing can be without the sun." His
excitement, which was already perceptible, mounted still higher; he
struggled for words, and exclaimed at last, "What would a man do
alone in the mountains? He cannot even build his fire without him."

I asked him whether he did not think the sun might be a fiery ball
shaped by an invisible god. My question did not even arouse
astonishment, let alone anger. Obviously it touched nothing within
him; he did not even think my question stupid. It merely left him cold,
I had the feeling that I had come upon an insurmountable wall. His
only reply was, "The sun is God. Everyone can see that."

Although no one can help feeling the tremendous impress of the
sun, it was a novel and deeply affecting experience for me to see
these mature, dignified men in the grip of an overmastering
emotion when they spoke of it.

Another time I stood by the river and looked up at the mountains,

which rise almost another six thousand feet above the plateau. I
was just thinking that this was the roof of the American continent,
and that people lived here in the face of the sun like the Indians who
stood wrapped in blankets on the highest roofs of the pueblo, mute
and absorbed in the sight of the sun. Suddenly a deep voice,
vibrant with suppressed emotion, spoke from behind me into my left
ear: "Do you not think that all life comes from the mountain?" An
elderly Indian had come up to me, inaudible in his moccasins, and
had asked me this heaven knows how far-reaching question. A
glance at the river pouring down from the mountain showed me the
outward image that had engendered this conclusion. Obviously all
life came from the mountain, for where there is water, there is life.
Nothing could be more obvious. In his question I felt a swelling
emotion connected with the word "mountain," and thought of the tale
of secret rites celebrated on the mountain. I replied, "Everyone can
see that you speak the truth".

Unfortunately, the conversation was soon interrupted, and so I did
not succeed in attaining any deeper insight into the symbolism of
water and mountain.

I observed that the Pueblo Indians, reluctant as they were to speak
about anything concerning their religion, talked with great readiness
and intensity about their relations with the Americans. "Why,"
Mountain Lake said, "do the Americans not let us alone? Why do
they want to forbid our dances? Why do they make difficulties when
we want to take our young people from school in order to lead them
to the kiva (site of the rituals) , and instruct them in our religion? We
do nothing to harm the Americans!" After a prolonged silence he
continued, "The Americans want to stamp out our religion. Why can
they not let us alone? What we do, we do not only for ourselves but
for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone
benefits by it."

I could observe from his excitement that he was alluding to some
extremely important element of his religion. I therefore asked him:
"You think, then, that what you do in your religion benefits the whole
world?" He replied with great animation, "Of course. If we did not do
it, what would become of the world?" And with a significant gesture
he pointed to the sun.

I felt that we were approaching extremely delicate ground here,
verging on the mysteries of the tribe. "After all," he said, "we are a
people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father
Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the
sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we
were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no
longer rise. Then it would be night forever".

I then realized on what the "dignity," the tranquil composure of the
individual Indian, was founded. It springs from his being a son of the
sun; his life is cosmologically meaningful, for he helps the father and
preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent. If we set against
this our own self-justifications, the meaning of our own lives as it is
formulated by our reason, we cannot help but see our poverty. Out
of sheer envy we are obliged to smile at the Indians' naivete and to
plume ourselves on our cleverness; for otherwise we would
discover how impoverished and down at the heels we are.
Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from
the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.

If for a moment we put away all European rationalism and transport
ourselves into the clear mountain air of that solitary plateau, which
drops off on one side into the broad continental prairies and on the
other into the Pacific Ocean; if we also set aside our intimate
knowledge of the world and exchange it for a horizon that seems
immeasurable, and an ignorance of what lies beyond it, we will
begin to achieve an inner comprehension of the Pueblo Indian's

point of view. "All life comes from the mountain" is immediately
convincing to him, and he is equally certain that he lives upon the
roof of an immeasurable world, closest to God. He above all others
has the Divinity's ear, and his ritual act will reach the distant sun
soonest of all. The holiness of mountains, the revelation of Yahweh
upon Sinai, the inspiration that Nietzsche was vouchsafed in the
Engadine -all speak the same language. The idea, absurd to us,
that a ritual act can magically affect the sun is, upon closer
examination, no less irrational but far more familiar to us than might
at first be assumed. Our Christian religion like every other,
incidentally is permeated by the idea that special acts or a special
kind of action can influence God for example, through certain rites
or by prayer, or by a morality pleasing to the Divinity.

The ritual acts of man are an answer and reaction to the action of
God upon man; and perhaps they are not only that, but are also
intended to be "activating," a form of magic coercion. That man
feels capable of formulating valid replies to the overpowering
influence of God, and that he can render back something which is
essential even to God, induces pride, for it raises the human
individual to the dignity of a metaphysical factor. "God and us" even
if it is only an unconscious sous-entendu-this equation no doubt
underlies that enviable serenity of the Pueblo Indian. Such a man is
in the fullest sense of the word in his proper place.

//'/'. KENYA AND UGANDA

Tout est bien sortant des mains de
I'Auteur des choses-Rousseau.

When I visited the Wembley Exhibition in London (1925), I was
deeply impressed by the excellent survey of the tribes under British
rule, and resolved to take a trip to tropical Africa in the near future.

In the autumn of that year I set out with two friends, an Englishman
and an American, for Mombassa. We traveled on a Woerman
steamer, together with many young Englishmen going out to posts
in various African colonies. It was evident from the atmosphere
aboard ship that these passengers were not traveling for pleasure,
but were entering upon their destiny.

To be sure, there was a good deal of gay exuberance, but the
serious undertone was also evident. As a matter of fact, I heard of
the fate of several of my fellow voyagers even before my own return
trip. Several met death in the tropics in the course of the next two
months. They died of tropical malaria, amoebic dysentery, and
pneumonia. Among those who died was the young man who sat
opposite me at table. Another was Dr. Akley who had made a
name for himself as the founder of the Gorilla Reservation in Central
Africa and whom I had met in New York shortly before this voyage.

Mombassa remains in my memory as a humidly hot, European,
Indian, and Negro settlement hidden in a forest of palms and
mango trees. It has an extremely picturesque setting, on a natural
harbor, with an old Portuguese fort towering over it. We stayed
there two days, and left toward evening on a narrow-gauge railroad
for Nairobi in the interior, plunging almost immediately into the
tropical night.

Along the coastal strip we passed by numerous Negro villages
where the people sat talking around tiny fires. Soon the train began
to climb. The settlements ceased, and the night became inky black.
Gradually it turned cooler, and I fell asleep. When the first ray of
sunlight announced the onset of day, I awoke. The train, swathed in
a red cloud of dust, was just making a turn around a steep red cliff.
On a jagged rock above us a slim, brownish-black figure stood
motionless, leaning on a long spear, looking down at the train.
Beside him towered a gigantic candelabrum cactus.

I was enchanted by this sight it was a picture of something utterly
alien and outside my experience, but on the other hand a most
intense sentiment du deja vu. I had the feeling that I had already
experienced this moment and had always known this world which
was separated from me only by distance in time. It was as if I were
this moment returning to the land of my youth, and as if I knew that
dark-skinned man who had been waiting for me for five thousand
years.

The feeling-tone of this curious experience accompanied me
throughout my whole journey through savage Africa. I can recall only
one other such recognition of the immemorially known.

That was when I first observed a parapsychological phenomenon,
together with my former chief, Professor Eugen Bleuler. Beforehand
I had imagined that I would be dumfounded if I were to see so
fantastic a thing. But when it happened, I was not surprised at all; I
felt it was perfectly natural, something I could take for granted
because I had long since been acquainted with it.

I could not guess 'what string within myself was plucked at the sight
of that solitary dark hunter. I knew only that his world had been mine
for countless millennia.

Somewhat bemused, I arrived around noon in Nairobi, situated at
an altitude of six thousand feet. There was a dazzling plethora of
light that reminded me of the glare of sunlight in the Engadine as
oue comes up out of the winter fogs of the lowlands. To my
astonishment the swarm of "boys" assembled at the railroad station
wore the old-fashioned gray and white woolen ski caps which I had
seen worn or worn myself in the Engadine. They are highly
esteemed because the upturned rim can be let down like a visor in
the Alps, good protection against the icy wind; here, against the

blazing heat.

From Nairobi we used a small Ford to visit the Athi Plains, a great
game preserve. From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnificent
prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw
gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog,
and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like
slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry
of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the
world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then
no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked
away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and
savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first
human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not
know that in this moment he had first really created it.

There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became
overwhelmingly clear to me. "What nature leaves imperfect, the art
perfects," say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation
put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective
existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without
considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated
down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on
senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a
cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and
God; there is no "new day" leading to "new shores" but only the
dreariness of calculated processes. My old Pueblo friend came to
my mind. He thought that the raison d'etre of his pueblo had been to
help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied
him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking
about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was,
and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion
of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the
world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence

without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying,
heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have
gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown
end. Human consciousness created objective existence and
meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great
process of being.

By the Uganda railroad, which was then being built, we traveled to
its provisional terminus, Station Sigistifour (sixty-four). The boys
unloaded our quantities of equipment. I sat down on a chop box, a
crate containing provisions, each one a man's head- load, and lit a
pipe, meditating on the fact that here we had, as it were, reached
the edge of the oikumene, the inhabited earth, from which trails
stretched endlessly over the continent. After a while an elderly
Englishman, obviously a squatter, joined me, sat down, and
likewise took out a pipe. He asked where we were going. When I
outlined our various destinations, he asked, "Is this the first time you
have been in Africa? I have been here for forty years."

"Yes," I told him. "At least in this part of Africa".

"Then may I give you a piece of advice? You know, mister, this here
country is not man's country, it's God's country. So if anything should
happen, just sit down and don't worry." Whereupon he rose and
without another word was lost in the horde of Negroes swarming
around us.

His words struck me as somehow significant, and I tried to visualize
the psychological state from which they had sprung. Evidently they
represented the quintessence of his experience; not man but God
was in command here in other words, notwill and intention, but
inscrutable design.

I had not come to the end of my meditation when our two

automobiles were ready to set off. Our party piled in with the
baggage, eight men strong, and we held on as best we could. The
shaking I received for the next several hours left no room for
reflection. It was much farther than I had thought to the next
settlement; Kakamegas, seat of a D.C. (District Commissioner),
headquarters of a small garrison of the African Rifles, and site of a
hospital and fantastically enough a small insane asylum. Evening
approached, and suddenly night had fallen. All at once, a tropical
storm came up, with almost incessant flashes of lightning, thunder,
and a cloudburst which instantly soaked us from head to foot and
made every brook a raging torrent.

It was half an hour after midnight, with the sky beginning to clear,
when we reached Kakamegas. We were exhausted, and the D.C.
helpfully received us with whisky in his drawing room. A jolly and oh-
so-welcome fire was burning in the fireplace. In the center of the
handsome room stood a large table with a display of English
journals. The place might easily have been a country house in
Sussex. In my tiredness I no longer knew whether I had been
transported from reality into a dream, or from a dream to reality.
Then we had still to pitch our tents for the first time. Luckily, nothing
was missing.

Next morning I awoke with a touch of feverish laryngitis, and had to
stay in bed for a day. To this circumstance I owe my memorable
acquaintanceship with the "brain-fever bird," a creature remarkable
for being able to sing a correct scale, but leaving out the last note
and starting again from the beginning. To listen to this when one is
down with a fever is to have one's nerves strained to the breaking
point.

Another feathered inhabitant of the banana plantations has a cry
which consists of two of the sweetest and most melodious flute
tones with a third, frightful sour note for an ending. "What nature

leaves imperfect..." The song of the "bell bird" however, was one of
unalloyed beauty. When it sang, it was as though a bell were drifting
along the horizon.

Next day, with the aid of the D.C., we rounded up our column of
bearers, which was supplemented by a military escort of three
Askaris. And now began the trek to Mt. Elgon, whose fourteen-
thousand-foot crater wall we soon saw on the horizon. The track led
through relatively dry savanna covered with umbrella acacias. The
whole district was densely covered with small, round tumuli between
six and ten feet high old termite colonies.

For travelers there were resthouses along the track round, grass-
roofed, rammed-earth huts, open and empty. At night a burning
lantern was placed in the entrance as protection against intruders.
Our cook had no lantern; but as a compensation he had a miniature
hut all to himself, with which he was highly pleased. But it nearly
proved fatal to him. The previous day he had slaughtered in front of
his hut a sheep that we had bought for five Uganda shillings, and
had prepared excellent mutton chops for our evening meal. After
dinner, while we were sitting around the fire, smoking, we heard
strange noises in the distance. The sounds came closer. They
sounded now like the growling of bears, now like the barking and
yapping of dogs; then again the sounds became shrill, like shrieks
and hysterical laughter. My first impression was: This is like a comic
turn atBarnum and Bailey's. Before long, however, the scene
became more menacing: we were surrounded on all sides by a
huge pack of hungry hyenas who had obviously smelled the sheep's
blood. They performed an infernal concert, and in the glow of the
fire their eyes could be seen glittering from the tall elephant grass.

In spite of our lofty knowledge of the nature of hyenas, which are
alleged not to attack man, we did not feel altogether sure of
ourselves and suddenly a frightful human scream came from behind

the resthouse. We snatched up our arms (a nine-mm. Mannlicher
rifle and a shotgun) and fired several rounds in the direction of
those glittering lights. As we did so, our cook came rushing panic-
stricken into our midst and babbled that a fizi had come into his hut
and almost killed him. The whole camp was in an uproar. The
excitement, it seemed, so frightened the pack of hyenas that they
quit the scene, protesting noisily. The bearers went on laughing for
a long time, after which the rest of the night passed quietly, without
further disturbance. Early next morning the local chief appeared with
a gift of two chickens and a basketful of eggs. He implored us to
stay another day to shoot the hyenas. The day before, he said, they
had dragged out an old man asleep in his hut and eaten him. De
Africa nihil certum!

At daybreak roars of laughter began again in the boys' quarters. It
appeared that they were re-enacting the events of the night. One of
them played the sleeping cook, and one of the soldiers played the
creeping hyena, approaching the sleeper with murderous intent.
This playlet was repeated I don't know how many times, to the utter
delight of the audience.

From then on the cook bore the nickname "Fizi." We three whites
already had our "trade-marks." My friend, the Englishman, was
called "Red Neck" to the native mind, all Englishmen had red
necks. The American, who sported an impressive wardrobe, was
known as "bwana maredadi (the dapper gentleman). Because I
already had gray hair at the time (I was then fifty), I was the "mzee"
the old man, and was regarded as a hundred years old. Advanced
age was rare in those parts; I saw very few white-haired men. Mzee
is also a title of honor and was accorded to me in my capacity as
head of the "Bugishu Psychological Expedition" an appellation
imposed by the Foreign Office in London as a lucus a non lucendo.
We did visit the Bugishus, but spent a much longer time with the
Elgonyis.

All in all, Negroes proved to be excellent judges of character. One
of their avenues to insight lay in their talent for mimicry. They could
imitate with astounding accuracy the manner of expression, the
gestures, the gaits of people, thus, to all intents and purposes,
slipping into their skins. I found their understanding of the emotional
nature of others altogether surprising. I would always take the time
to engage in the long palavers for which, they had a pronounced
fondness. In this way I learned a great deal.

Our traveling semiofficially proved advantageous, since in this way
we found it easier to recruit bearers, and we were also given a
military escort. The latter was by no means superfluous, since we
were going to travel in territories that were not under white control.
A corporal and two privates accompanied our safari to Mt Elgon.

We could not help the chief by hunting the hyenas, and continued on
our way after the adventure. The terrain sloped gently upward.
Signs of Tertiary lava beds increased. We passed through glorious
stretches of jungle with huge Nandi flame trees flaunting their red
blossoms. Enormous beetles and even larger brilliantly colored
butterflies enlivened the clearings and the edges of the jungle.
Branches were shaken by inquisitive monkeys as we advanced
further into the bush. It was a paradisal world. Most of the way we
still traversed flat savanna with deep red soil. We tramped mostly
along the native trails which meandered in strikingly sharp turns.
Our route led us into the Nandi region, and through the Nandi
Forest, a sizable area of jungle. Without incident we reached a
resthouse at the foot of Mt. Elgon, which had been towering higher
and higher above our heads for days. Here the climb began, along
a narrow path. We were greeted by the local chief, who was the son
of the laibon, the medicine man. He rode a pony the only horse we
had so far seen. From him we learned that his tribe belonged to the
Masai, but lived in isolation here on the slopes of Mt. Elgon.

There a letter awaited us from the governor of Uganda, requesting
us to take under our protection an English lady who was on her way
back to Egypt via the Sudan. The governor was aware that we were
following the same itinerary, and since we had already met the lady
in Nairobi we knew that she would be a congenial companion.
Moreover, we were under considerable obligation to the governor
for his having helped us in all sorts of ways.

I mention this episode to suggest the subtle modes by which an
archetype influences our actions. We were three men; that was a
matter of pure chance. I had asked another friend of mine to join us,
which would have made a fourth. But circumstances had prevented
him from accepting. That sufficed to produce an unconscious or
fated constellation: the archetype of the triad, which calls for the
fourth to complete it, as we have seen again and again in the
history of this archetype.

Since I am inclined to accept chance when it comes my way, I
welcomed the lady to our group of three men. Hardy and intrepid,
she proved a useful counterpoise to our one-sided masculinity.
When one of our party came down with a bad case of tropical
malaria, we were grateful for the experience she had acquired as a
nurse during the First World War.

After a few hours of climbing we reached a lovely large clearing,
bisected by a clear, cool brook with a waterfall about ten feet in
height. The pool at the bottom of the waterfall became our bath. Our
campsite was situated about three hundred yards away, on a
gentle, dry slope, shadowed by umbrella acacias. Nearby-that is,
about fifteen minutes' walk away was a native kraal which consisted
of a few huts and a boma-a yard surrounded by a hedge of wait-a-
bit thorn. This kraal provided us with our water bearers, a woman
and her two half-grown daughters, who were naked except for a belt

of cowries. They were chocolate-brown and strikingly pretty, with
fine slim figures and an aristocratic leisureliness about their
movements. It was a pleasure for me each morning to hear the soft
ding-clang of their iron ankle rings as they came up from the brook,
and soon afterward to see their swaying gait as they emerged from
the tall yellow elephant grass, balancing the amphorae of water on
their heads. They were adorned with ankle rings, brass bracelets
and necklaces, earrings of copper or wood in the shape of small
spools. Their lower lips were pierced with either a bone or iron nail.
They had very good manners, and always greeted us with shy,
charming smiles.

With a single exception, which I shall mention shortly, I never spoke
to a native woman, this being what was expected of me. As in
Southern Europe, men speak to men, women to women. Anything
else signifies love-making. The white who goes in for this not only
forfeits his authority, but runs the serious risk of "going black." I
observed several highly instructive examples of this. Quite often I
heard the natives pass judgment upon a certain white: "He is a bad
man." When I asked why, the reply was invariably, "He sleeps with
our women."

Among my Elgonyis, the men busied themselves with the cattle and
with hunting; the women were identified with the shamba, a field of
bananas, sweet potatoes, kaffir (grain sorghum), and maize. They
kept children, goats, and chickens in the same round hut in which
the family lived. Their dignity and naturalness flow from their function
in the economy; they are intensely active business partners. The
concept of equal rights for women is the product of an age in which
such partnership has lost its meaning. Primitive society is regulated
by an unconscious egoism and altruism; both attitudes are wisely
given their due. This unconscious order breaks up at once if any
disturbance ensues which has to be remedied by a conscious act.

It gives me pleasure to recall one of my important informants on
family relations among the Elgonyi. He was a strikingly handsome
youth by the name of Gibroat the son of a chief, charming and
distinguished in manners, whose confidence I had evidently won. To
be sure, he gladly accepted my cigarettes, but he was not greedy
for them, as the others were for all sorts of gifts. From time to time
he would pay me a gentlemanly visit and tell me all sorts of
interesting things. I felt that he had something in mind, some
request that he somehow could not voice. Not until we had known
each other for some time did he astonish me by asking me to meet
his family, I knew that he himself was still unmarried, and that his
parents were dead. The family in question was that of an elder
sister; she was married as a second wife, and had four children.
Gibroat very much wanted me to pay her a visit, so that she would
have the opportunity to meet me. Evidently she filled the place of a
mother in his life. I agreed, because I hoped in this social way to
obtain some insight into native family life.

"Madame etait chez elle" she came out of the hut when we arrived,
and greeted me with utter naturalness. She was a good-looking
woman, middle-aged that is, about thirty. Aside from the obligatory
cowrie belt, she wore arm and ankle rings, some copper ornaments
hanging from the greatly extended ear lobe, and the skin of some
small game animal over her breast. She had locked her four little
"mtotos" in the hut; they peered out through cracks in the door,
giggling excitedly. At my request she let them out; but it took some
time before they dared to emerge. She had the same excellent
manners as her brother, who was beaming joyfully at the success of
his coup.

We did not sit down, since there was nowhere to sit except on the
dusty ground, which was covered with chicken droppings and goat
pellets. The conversation moved in the conventional framework of
semi-familial drawing-room talk, revolving around family, children,

house, and garden. Her elder co-wife, whose property bordered on
hers, had six children. The boma of this "sister" was some eighty
yards away. Approximately halfway between the two women's huts,
at the apex of a triangle, stood the husband's hut, and behind that,
about fifty yards away, a small hut occupied by the first wife's
already grown son. Each of the two women had her own shamba.
My hostess was obviously proud of hers.

I had the feeling that the confidence and self-assurance of her
manner were founded to a great extent upon her identity with her
own wholeness, her private world made up of children, house, small
livestock, shamba and last but not least her not-unattractive
physique. The husband was referred to only in an allusive way. It
seemed that he was sometimes here, sometimes not here. At the
moment he was staying at some unknown place. My hostess was
plainly and unproblematically the embodiment of stability, a
veritable pied-a-terre for the husband. The question did not seem to
be whether or not he was there, but rather whether she was present
in her wholeness, providing a geomagnetic center for the husband
who wandered over the land with his herds. What goes on in the
interior of these "simple" souls is not conscious, is therefore
unknown, and we can only deduce it from comparative evidence of
"advanced" European differentiation.

I asked myself whether the growing masculinization of the white
woman is not connected with the loss of her natural wholeness
(shamba, children, livestock, house of her own, hearth fire); whether
it is not a compensation for her impoverishment; and whether the
feminizing of the white man is not a further consequence. The more
rational the polity, the more blurred is the difference between the
sexes. The role homosexuality plays in modern society is
enormous. It is partly the consequence of the mother-complex,
partly a purposive phenomenon (prevention of reproduction).

My companions and I had the good fortune to taste the world of
Africa, with its incredible beauty and its equally incredible suffering,
before the end came. Our camp life proved to be one of the
loveliest interludes in my life. I enjoyed the "divine peace" of a still
primeval country. Never had I seen so clearly "man and the other
animals" (Herodotus). Thousands of miles lay between me and
Europe, mother of all demons. The demons could not reach me
here there were no telegrams, no telephone calls, no letters, no
visitors. My liberated psychic forces poured blissfully back to the
primeval expanses.

It was easy for us to arrange a palaver each morning with the
natives who squatted all day long around our camp and watched
our doings with never-fading interest. My headman, Ibrahim, had
initiated me into the etiquette of the palaver. All the men (the women
never came near) had to sit on the ground. Ibrahim had obtained for
me a small four-legged chiefs stool of mahogany on which I had to
sit. Then I began with an address and set forth the shauri, that is, the
agenda of the palaver. Most of the natives spoke a tolerable pidgin
Swahili; and I for my part would manage to speak to them by
making ample use of a small dictionary. This little book was the
object of unwearying admiration. My limited vocabulary imposed
upon me a needful simplicity. Often the conversation resembled an
amusing game of guessing riddles, for which reason the palavers
enjoyed great popularity. The sessions seldom lasted longer than
an hour or an hour and a half, because the men grew visibly tired,
and would complain, with dramatic gestures, "Alas, we are so
tired."

I was naturally much interested in the natives' dreams, but at first
could not get them to tell me any. I offered small rewards,
cigarettes, matches, safety pins, and such things, which they were
eager to have. But nothing helped. I could never completely explain
their shyness about telling dreams. I suspect the reason was fear

and distrust. It is well known that Negroes are afraid of being
photographed; they fear that anyone who takes a picture of them is
robbing them of their soul, and perhaps they likewise fear that harm
may come to them from anyone who has knowledge of their
dreams. This, incidentally, did not apply to our boys, who were
coastal Somalis and Swahilis. They had an Arab dream book which
they daily consulted during the trek. If they were in doubt about an
interpretation, they would actually come to me for advice. They
termed me a "man of the Book" because of my knowledge of the
Koran. To their minds, I was a disguised Mohammedan.

One time we had a palaver with the laibon, the old medicine man.
He appeared in a splendid cloak made of the skins of blue
monkeys a valuable article of display. When I asked him about his
dreams, he answered with tears in his eyes, "In old days the laibons
had dreams, and knew whether there is war or sickness or whether
rain comes and where the herds should be driven." His grandfather,
too, had still dreamed. But since the whites were in Africa, he said,
no one had dreams any more. Dreams were no longer needed
because now the English knew everything!

His reply showed me that the medicine man had lost his raison
d'etre. The divine voice which counseled the tribe was no longer
needed because "the English know better." Formerly the medicine
man had negotiated with the gods or the power of destiny, and had
advised his people. He exerted great influence, just as in ancient
Greece the word of the Pythia possessed the highest authority.
Now the medicine man's authority was replaced by that of the D.C.
The value of life now lay wholly in this world, and it seemed to me
only a question of time and of the vitality of the black race before the
Negroes would become conscious of the importance of physical
power.

Far from being an imposing personality, our laibon was only a

somewhat tearful old gentleman. He was the living embodiment of
the spreading disintegration of an undermined, outmoded,
unrestorable world.

On numerous occasions I brought the conversation around to the
numina, especially to rites and ceremonies. Concerning these, I
had only a single piece of evidence. In front of an empty hut, in the
middle of a busy village street, I had seen a carefully swept spot
several yards in diameter. In the center lay a cowrie belt, arm and
ankle rings, earrings, the shards of all sorts of pots, and a digging
stick. All that we were able to learn about this was the fact that a
woman had died in this hut. Nothing whatsoever was said about a
funeral.

In the palaver the people assured me with considerable emphasis
that their neighbors to the west were "bad" people. If someone died
there, the next village was informed, and in the evening the body
was brought to the midpoint between the two villages. From the
other side, presents of various sorts were brought to the same spot,
and in the morning the corpse was no longer there. It was plainly
insinuated that the other village devoured the dead. Such things
never happened among the Elgonyi, they said. To be sure, their
dead were laid out in the bush, where the hyenas took care of them
in the course of the night. In point of fact we never found any signs of
burial of the dead.

I was informed, however, that when a man dies, his body is placed
on the floor in the middle of the hut. The laibon walks around the
body, sprinkling milk from a bowl on to the floor, murmuring, "Ayik
adhista, adhista ayikr!

I knew the meaning of these words from a memorable palaver that
had taken place earlier. At the end of that palaver an old man had
suddenly exclaimed, "In the morning, when the sun comes, we go

out of the huts, spit into our hands, and hold them up to the sun." I
had him show me the ceremony and describe it exactly. They held
their hands in front of their mouths, spat or blew vigorously, then
turned the palms upward toward the sun. I asked what this meant,
why they blew or spat into their hands. My questioning was in vain.
"We've always done it," they said. It was impossible to obtain any
explanation, and I realized that they actually knew only that they did
it, not what they were doing. They themselves saw no meaning in
this action. But we, too, perform ceremonies without realizing what
we are doing such as lighting Christmas tree candles, hiding Easter
eggs, etc.

The old man said that this was the true religion of all peoples, that
all Kevirondos, all Buganda, all tribes for as far as the eye could
see from the mountain and endlessly farther, worshiped adhista that
is, the sun at the moment of rising. Only then was the sun mungu,
God. The first delicate golden crescent of the new moon in the
purple of the western sky was also God. But only at that time;
otherwise not.

Evidently, the meaning of the Elgonyi ceremony was that an offering
was being made to the sun divinity at the moment of its rising. If the
gift was spittle, it was the substance which in the view of primitives
contains the personal mana, the power of healing, magic, and life. If
it was breath, then it was roho-Arabic, ruch, Hebrew, ruach, Greek,
pneuma wind and spirit. The act was therefore saying: I offer to God
my living soul. It was a wordless, acted-out prayer which might
equally well be rendered: "Lord, into thy hands I commend my
spirit."

Besides adhista the Elgonyi we were further informed also venerate
ayik, the spirit who dwells in the earth and is a sheitan (devil). He is
the creator of fear, a cold wind who lies in wait for the nocturnal
traveler. The old man whistled a kind of Loki motif to convey vividly

how the ayik creeps through the tall, mysterious grass of the bush.

In general the people asseverated that the Creator had made
everything good and beautiful. He was beyond good and evil. He
was m'zuri, that is, beautiful, and everything he did was m'zuri.

When I asked: "But what about the wicked animals who kill your
cattle?" they said, "The lion is good and beautiful." "And your
horrible diseases?" They said, "You lie in the sun and it is good."

I was impressed by this optimism. But at six o'clock in the evening
this optimism was suddenly over, as I soon discovered. From
sunset on, it was a different world the dark world of ayik, of evil,
danger, fear. The optimistic philosophy gave way to fear of ghosts
and magical practices intended to secure protection from evil.
Without any inner contradiction the optimism returned at dawn.

It was a profoundly stirring experience for me to find, at the sources
of the Nile, this reminder of the ancient Egyptian conception of the
two acolytes of Osiris, Horus and Set. Here, evidently, was a
primordial African experience that had flowed down to the coasts of
the Mediterranean along with the sacred waters of the Nile: adhista,
the rising sun, the principle of light like Horus; ayik, the principle of
darkness, the breeder of fear. In the simple rites performed for the
dead, the laibons words and his sprinkling of milk unite the
opposites; he simultaneously sacrifices to these two principles,
which are of equal power and significance since the time of their
dominance, the rule of day and of night, each visibly lasts for twelve
hours. The important thing, however, is the moment when, with the
typical suddenness of the tropics, the first ray of light shoots forth
like an arrow and night passes into life-filled light.

The sunrise in these latitudes was a phenomenon that overwhelmed
me anew every day. The drama of it lay less in the splendor of the

sun's shooting up over the horizon than in what happened afterward.
I formed the habit of taking my camp stool and sitting under an
umbrella acacia just before dawn. Before me, at the bottom of the
little valley, lay a dark, almost black-green strip of jungle, with the
rim of the plateau on the opposite side of the valley towering above
it. At first, the contrasts between light and darkness would be
extremely sharp. Then objects would assume contour and emerge
into the light which seemed to fill the valley with a compact
brightness. The horizon above became radiantly white. Gradually
the swelling light seemed to penetrate into the very structure of
objects, which became illuminated from within until at last they
shone translucently like bits of colored glass. Everything turned to
flaming crystal. The cry of the bell bird rang around the horizon. At
such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most
sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or
rather, in a timeless ecstasy.

Near my observation point was a high cliff inhabited by big
baboons. Every morning they sat quietly, almost motionless, on the
ridge of the cliff facing the sun, whereas throughout the rest of the
day they ranged noisily through the forest, screeching and
chattering. Like me, they seemed to be waiting for the sunrise. They
reminded me of the great baboons of the temple of Abu Simbel in
Egypt, which perform the gesture of adoration. They tell the same
story: for untold ages men have worshiped the great god who
redeems the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in
the heavens.

At that time I understood that within the soul from its primordial
beginnings there has been a desire for light and an irrepressible
urge to rise out of the primal darkness. When the great night
comes, everything takes on a note of deep dejection, and every
soul is seized by an inexpressible longing for light. That is the pent-
up feeling that can be detected in the eyes of primitives, and also in

the eyes of animals. There is a sadness in animals' eyes, and we
never know whether that sadness is bound up with the soul of the
animal or is a poignant message which speaks to us out of that still
unconscious existence. That sadness also reflects the mood of
Africa, the experience of its solitudes. It is a maternal mystery, this
primordial darkness. That is why the sun's birth in the morning
strikes the natives as so overwhelmingly meaningful. The moment in
which light comes is God. That moment brings redemption, release.
To say that the sun is God is to blur and forget the archetypal
experience of that moment. "We are glad that the night when the
spirits are abroad is over now," the natives will say but that is
already a rationalization. In reality a darkness altogether different
from natural night broods over the land. It is the psychic primal night
which is the same today as it has been for countless millions of
years. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

Our blissful stay on Mt. Elgon neared its end. With heavy hearts we
struck our tents, promising ourselves that we would return. I could
not have brought myself to think that this would be the first and the
last time I would experience this unlooked-for glory. Since then, gold
has been discovered near Kakamegas, mining has begun, the
Mau-Mau movement has arisen among those innocent and friendly
natives, and we too have known a rude awakening from the dream
of civilization.

We trekked along the southern slope of Mt. Elgon. Gradually the
character of the landscape changed. Higher mountains, covered
with dense jungle, verged on the plain. The color of the inhabitants
grew blacker; their bodies became clumsier and more massive,
lacking the grace of the Masai. We were entering the territory of the
Bugishu, where we stayed some time in the resthouse of
Bunambale. It is situated at a high altitude, and we had a splendid
view of the broad Nile valley. From there we went on to Mbala,

where we were met by two Ford trucks that took us to Jinja, on Lake
Victoria. We loaded our baggage onto a train of the narrow-gauge
railroad; once every two weeks it went to Lake Kioga. A paddle-
wheel steamer whose boiler was fired by wood picked us up and
after a number of incidents brought us to Masindi Port. There we
transferred to a truck and so reached Masindi Town, which is
situated on the plateau that separates Lake Kioga from Albert
Nyanza.

In a village on the way from Lake Albert to Rejdf in the Sudan we
had a very exciting experience. The local chief, a tall, still quite
young man,' appeared with his retinue. These were the blackest
Negroes I had ever seen. There was something about the group
which was not exactly reassuring. The mamur[1] of Nimule had
given us three askaris as an escort, but I saw that they as well as
our own boys did not feel at all easy. After all, they had only three
cartridges each for their rifles. Their presence, consequently, was a
merely symbolic gesture on the part of the government.

When the chief proposed that he give a rigoma (dance) in the
evening, I assented gladly. I hoped that the frolic would bring their
better nature to the fore. Night had fallen and we were all longing for
sleep when we heard drums and horn blasts. Soon some sixty men
appeared, martially equipped with flashing lances, clubs, and
swords. They were followed at some distance by the women and
children; even the infants were present, carried on their mothers'
backs. This was obviously to be a

1 El mamur, literally, prefect or governor.

grand social occasion. In spite of the heat, which still hovered
around ninety-three degrees, a big fire was kindled, and women
and children formed a circle around it. The men formed an outer
ring around them, as I had once observed a nervous herd of

elephants do. I did not know whether I ought to feel pleased or
anxious about this mass display. I looked around for our boys and
the government soldiers they had vanished completely from the
camp! As a gesture of good will, I distributed cigarettes, matches,
and safety pins. The men's chorus began to sing, vigorous,
bellicose melodies, not unharmonious, and at the same time began
to swing their legs. The women and children tripped around the fire;
the men danced toward it, waving their weapons, then drew back
again, and then advanced anew, amid savage singing, drumming,
and trumpeting.

It was a wild and stirring scene, bathed in the glow of the fire and
magical moonlight. My English friend and I sprang to our feet and
mingled with the dancers. I swung my rhinoceros whip, the only
weapon I had, and danced with them. By their beaming faces I
could see that they approved of our taking part. Their zeal
redoubled; the whole company stamped, sang, shouted, sweating
profusely. Gradually the rhythm of the dance and the drumming
accelerated.

In dances such as these, accompanied by such music, the natives
easily fall into a virtual state of possession. That was the case now.
As eleven o'clock approached, their excitement began to get out of
bounds, and suddenly the whole affair took on a highly curious
aspect. The dancers were being transformed into a wild horde, and
I became worried about how it would end. I signed to the chief that it
was time to stop, and that he and his people ought to go to sleep.
But he kept wanting "just another one."

I remembered that a countryman of mine, one of the Sarasin
cousins, on an exploratory expedition in Celebes had been struck
by a stray spear in the course of such a rigoma. And so,
disregarding the chiefs pleas, I called the people together,
distributed cigarettes, and then made the gesture of sleeping. Then

I swung my rhinoceros whip threateningly, but at the same time
laughing, and for lack of any better language I swore at them loudly
in Swiss German that this was enough and they must go home to
bed and sleep now. It was apparent to the people that I was to
some extent pretending my anger, but that seems to have struck
just the right note. General laughter arose; capering, they scattered
in all directions and vanished into the night. For a long time we
heard their jovial howls and drumming in the distance. At last
silence fell, and we dropped into the sleep of exhaustion.

Our trek came to an end in Rejaf on the Nile. There we stowed our
gear onto a paddle-wheel steamer which just succeeded in docking
at Rejaf; the water level was almost too low for it. By this time I was
feeling burdened by all that I had experienced. A thousand thoughts
were whirling around me, and it became painfully clear to me that
my capacity to digest new impressions was quickly approaching its
limits. The thing to do was to go over all my observations and
experiences and discover their inner connections. I had written
down everything worth noting.

During the entire trip my dreams stubbornly followed the tactic of
ignoring Africa. They drew exclusively upon scenes from home, and
thus seemed to say that they considered if it is permissible to
personify the unconscious processes to this extent the African
journey not as something real, but rather as a symptomatic or
symbolic act. Even the most impressive events of the trip were
rigorously excluded from my dreams. Only once during the entire
expedition did I dream of a Negro. His face appeared curiously
familiar to me, but I had to reflect a long time before I could
determine where I had met him before. Finally it came to me: he
had been my barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee! An American
Negro. In the dream he was holding a tremendous, red-hot curling
iron to my head, intending to make my hair kinky that is, to give me
Negro hair. I could already feel the painful heat, and awoke with a

sense of terror.

I took this dream as a warning from the unconscious; it was saying
that the primitive was a danger to me. At that time I was obviously
all too close to "going black". I was suffering an attack of sandfly
fever which probably reduced my psychic resistance. In order to
represent a Negro threatening me, my unconscious had invoked a
twelve-year-old memory of my Negro barber in America, just in
order to avoid any reminder of the present.

This curious behavior of my dreams corresponds, incidentally, to a
phenomenon which was noted during the First World War. Soldiers
in the field dreamt far less of the war than of their homes. Military
psychiatrists considered it a basic principle that a man should be
pulled out of the front lines when he started dreaming too much of
war scenes, for that meant he no longer possessed any psychic
defenses against the impressions from outside.

Parallel to my involvement with this demanding African environment,
an interior line was being successfully secured within my dreams.
The dreams dealt with my personal problems. The only thing I could
conclude from this was that my European personality must under all
circumstances be preserved intact.

To my astonishment, the suspicion dawned on me that I had
undertaken my African adventure with the secret purpose of
escaping from Europe and its complex of problems, even at the risk
of remaining in Africa, as so many before me had done, and as so
many were doing at this very time. The trip revealed itself as less an
investigation of primitive psychology ("Bugishu Psychological
Expedition," B.P.E., black letters on the chop boxes!) than a
probing into the rather embarrassing question: What is going to
happen to Jung the psychologist in the wilds of Africa? This was a
question I had constantly sought to evade, in spite of my intellectual

intention to study the European's reaction to primitive conditions. It
became clear to me that this study had been not so much an
objective scientific project as an intensely personal one, and that
any attempt to go deeper into it touched every possible sore spot in
my own psychology. I had to admit to myself that it was scarcely the
Wembley Exhibition which had begotten my decision to travel, but
rather the fact that the atmosphere had become too highly charged
forme in Europe.

Amid such thoughts I glided on the peaceful waters of the Nile
toward the north toward Europe, toward the future. The voyage
ended at Khartoum. There Egypt began. And thus I fulfilled my
desire and my plan to approach this cultural realm not from the
west, from the direction of Europe and Greece, but from the south,
from the sources of the Nile. I was less interested in the complex
Asiatic elements in Egyptian culture than in the Hamitic contribution.
By following the geographical course of the Nile, and hence the
stream of time, I could find out something about that for myself. My
greatest illumination in this respect had been my discovery of the
Horus principle among the Elgonyi. That whole episode, and all that
it meant, was dramatically called to mind again when I saw the
sculptured cynocephali (dog-faced baboons) of Abu Simbel, the
southern gate of Egypt.

The myth of Horus is the age-old story of the newly risen divine light.
It is a myth which must have been told after human culture that is,
consciousness had for the first time released men from the
darkness of prehistoric times. Thus the journeyfrom the heart of
Africa to Egypt became, for me, a kind of drama of the birth of light.
That drama was intimately connected with me, with my psychology. I
realized this, but felt incapable of formulating it in words. I had not
known in advance what Africa would give me; but here lay the
satisfying answer, the fulfilling experience. It was worth more to me
than any ethnological yield would have been, any collection of

weapons, ornaments, pottery, or hunting trophies. I had wanted to
know how Africa would affect me, and I had found out.

iv. INDIA [2]

My journey to India, in 1938, was not taken on my own initiative. It
arose out of an invitation from the British Government of India to
take part in the celebrations connected with the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the University of Calcutta.

By that time I had read a great deal about Indian philosophy and
religious history, and was deeply convinced of the value of

2 On his return from India, Jung contributed two articles to the
magazine Asia (New York, January and February issues, 1939):
"The Dreamlike World of India," and "What India Can Teach Us."
They are included in Civilization in Transition (CW 10). A. J.

Oriental wisdom. But I had to travel in order to form my own
conclusions, and remained within myself like a homunculus in the
retort. India affected me like a dream, for I was and remained in
search of myself, of the truth peculiar to myself.

The journey formed an intermezzo in the intensive study of
alchemical philosophy on which I was engaged at the time. This had
so strong a grip upon me that I took along the first volume of the
Theatrum Chemicum of 1602, which contains the principal writings
of Gerardus Dorneus. In the course of the voyage I studied the book
from beginning to end. Thus it was that this material belonging to
the fundamental strata of European thought was constantly
counterpointed by my impressions of a foreign mentality and
culture. Both had emerged from original psychic experiences of the
unconscious, and therefore had produced the same, similar, or at
least comparable insights.

India gave me my first direct experience of an alien, highly
differentiated culture. Altogether different elements had ruled my
Central African journey; culture had not predominated. As for North
Africa, I had never had the opportunity there to talk with a person
capable of putting his culture into words. In India, however, I had the
chance to speak with representatives of the Indian mentality, and to
compare it with the European. I had searching talks with S.
Subramanya Iyer, the guru of the Maharajah of Mysore, whose
guest I was for some time; also with many others, whose names
unfortunately have escaped me. On the other hand, I studiously
avoided all so-called "holy men." I did so because I had to make do
with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on
my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from
the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe
can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life
out of myself out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature
brings to me.

In India I was principally concerned with the question of the
psychological nature of evil. I had been very much impressed by the
way this problem is integrated in Indian spiritual life, and I saw it in a
new light. In a conversation with a cultivated Chinese I was also
impressed, again and again, by the fact that these people are able
to integrate so-called "evil" without 'losing face." In the West we
cannot do this. For the Oriental the problem of morality does not
appear to take first place, as it does for us. To the Oriental, good
and evil are meaningfully contained in nature, and are merely
varying degrees of the same thing.

I saw that Indian spirituality contains as much of evil as of good. The
Christian strives for good and succumbs to evil; the Indian feels
himself to be outside good and evil, and seeks to realize this state
by meditation or yoga. My objection is that, given such an attitude,

neither good nor evil takes on any real outline, and this produces a
certain stasis. One does not really believe in evil, and one does not
really believe in good. Good or evil are then regarded at most as
my good or my evil, as whatever seems to me good or evil which
leaves us with the paradoxical statement that Indian spirituality
lacks both evil and good, or is so burdened by contradictions that it
needs nirdvandva, the liberation from opposites and from the ten
thousand things.

The Indian's goal is not moral perfection, but the condition of
nirdvandva. He wishes to free himself from nature; in keeping with
this aim, he seeks in meditation the condition of imagelessness
and emptiness. I, on the other hand, wish to persist in the state of
lively contemplation of nature and of the psychic images. I want to
be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from
nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles. Nature,
the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded and what
more could I wish for? To me the supreme meaning of Being can
consist only in the fact that it is, not that it is not or is no longer.

To me there is no liberation a tout prix. I cannot be liberated from
anything that I do not possess, have not done or experienced. Real
liberation becomes possible for me only when I have done all that I
was able to do, when I have completely devoted myself to a thing
and participated in it to the utmost. If I withdraw from participation, I
am virtually amputating the corresponding part of my psyche.
Naturally, there may be good reasons for my not immersing myself
in a given experience. But then I am forced to confess my inability,
and must know that I may have neglected to do something of vital
importance. In this way I make amends for the lack of a positive act
by the clear knowledge of my incompetence.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has
never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and

at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house.
Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is
always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with
added force.

In Konarak (Orissa) I met a pandit who obligingly offered to come
with me on my visit to the temple and the great temple car. The
pagoda is covered from base to pinnacle with exquisitely obscene
sculptures. We talked for a long time about this extraordinary fact,
which he explained to me as a means to achieve spiritualization. I
objected pointing to a group of young peasants who were standing
open-mouthed before the monument, admiring these splendors that
such young men were scarcely undergoing spiritualization at the
moment, but were much more likely having their heads filled with
sexual fantasies. Whereupon he replied, "But that is just the point.
How can they ever become spiritualized if they do not first fulfill their
karma? These admittedly obscene images are here for the very
purpose of recalling to the people their dharma [law]; otherwise
these unconscious fellows might forget it."

I thought it an odd notion that young men might forget their sexuality,
like animals out of rutting time. My sage, however, resolutely
maintained that they were as unconscious as animals and actually
in need of urgent admonishments. To this end, he said, before they
set foot inside the temple they were reminded of their dharma by
the exterior decorations; for unless they were made conscious of
theirdharma and fulfilled it, they could not partake of spiritualization.

As we entered through the gate of the temple, my companion
pointed to the two "temptresses," statues of two dancing girls with
seductively curved hips who smilingly greeted all who entered. "Do
you see these two dancing girls?" he said. "Their meaning is the
same. Naturally, this does not apply to people like you and me, for
we have attained to a level of consciousness which is above this

sort of thing. But for these peasant boys it is an indispensable
instruction and admonishment."

When we left the temple and were walking down a lingam lane, he
suddenly said, "Do you see these stones? Do you know what they
mean? I will tell you a great secret." I was astonished, for I thought
that the phallic nature of these monuments was known to every
child. But he whispered into my ear with the greatest seriousness,
"These stones are man's private parts". I had expected him to tell
me that they signified the great god Shiva. I looked at him
dumfounded, but he only nodded self- importantly, as if to say, "Yes,
that is how it is. No doubt you in your European ignorance would
never have thought so!" When I told this story to Heinrich Zimmer,
he exclaimed in delight, "At last I have heard something real about
India for a change!"

When I visited the stupas of Sanchi, where Buddha delivered his
fire sermon, I was overcome by a strong emotion of the kind that
frequently develops in me when I encounter a thing, person, or idea
of whose significance I am still unconscious. The stupas are
situated on a rocky hill whose peak can be reached by a pleasant
path of great stone slabs laid down through a green meadow. The
stupas are tombs or containers of relics, hemispherical in shape,
like two gigantic rice bowls placed one on top of the other
(concavity upon concavity), according to the prescripts of the
Buddha himself in the Maha-Parinibbana-Sutta. The British have
done their restoration work in a most respectful spirit. The largest of
these buildings is surrounded by a wall which has four elaborate
gates. You come in by one of these and the path turns to the left,
then leads into a clockwise circumambulation around the stupa. At
the four cardinal points stand statues of the Buddha. When you
have completed one circumambulation, you enter a second, higher
circuit which runs in the same direction. The distant prospect over
the plain, the stupas themselves, the temple ruins, and the solitary

stillness of this holy site held me in a spell. I took leave of my
companion and submerged myself in the overpowering mood of the
place.

After a while I heard rhythmic gong tones approaching from the
distance. A group of Japanese pilgrims came marching up one
behind the other, each striking a small gong. They were beating out
the rhythm of the age-old prayer Om mani padme hum, the stroke of
the gong falling upon the hum. Outside the stupas they bowed low,
then passed through the gate. There they bowed again before the
statue of the Buddha, intoning a chorale-like song. They completed
the double circumambulation, singing a hymn before each statue of
the Buddha. As I watched them, my mind and spirit were with them,
and something within me silently thanked them for having so
wonderfully come to the aid of my inarticulate feelings.

The intensity of my emotion showed that the hill of Sanchi meant
something central to me. A new side of Buddhism was revealed to
me there. I grasped the life of the Buddha as the reality of the self
which had broken through and laid claim to a personal life. For
Buddha, the self stands above all gods, a unus mundus which
represents the essence of human existence and of the world as a
whole. The self embodies both the aspect of intrinsic being and the
aspect of its being, known, without which no world exists. Buddha
saw and grasped the cosmogonic dignity of human consciousness;
for that reason he saw clearly that if a man succeeded in
extinguishing this light, the world would sink into nothingness.
Schopenhauer's great achievement lay in his also recognizing this,
or rediscovering it independently.

Christ like Buddha is an embodiment of the self, but in an altogether
different sense. Both stood for an overcoming of the world: Buddha
out of rational insight; Christ as a foredoomed sacrifice. In
Christianity more is suffered, in Buddhism more is seen and done.

Both paths are right, but in the Indian sense Buddha is the more
complete human being. He is a historical personality, and therefore
easier for men to understand. Christ is at once a historical man and
God, and therefore much more difficult to comprehend. At bottom
he was not comprehensible even to himself; he knew only that he
had to sacrifice himself, that this course was imposed upon him
from within. His sacrifice happened to him like an act of destiny.
Buddha lived out his life and died at an advanced age, whereas
Christ's activity as Christ probably lasted no more than a year.

Later, Buddhism underwent the same transformation as
Christianity: Buddha became, as it were, the image of the
development of the self; he became a model for men to imitate,
whereas actually he had preached that by overcoming the Nidana-
chain every human being could become an illuminate, a buddha.
Similarly, in Christianity, Christ is an exemplar who dwells in every
Christian as his integral personality. But historical trends led to the
imitatio Christi, whereby the individual does not pursue his own
destined road to wholeness, but attempts to imitate the way taken
by Christ. Similarly in the East, historical trends led to a devout
imitation of the Buddha. That Buddha should have become a model
to be imitated was in itself a weakening of his idea, just as the
imitatio Christi was a forerunner of the fateful stasis in the evolution
of the Christian idea. As Buddha, by virtue of his insight, was far in
advance of the Brahma gods, so Christ cried out to the Jews, "You
are gods" (John 10:34) ; but men were incapable of understanding
what he meant. Instead we find that the so-called Christian West, far
from creating a new world, is moving with giant strides toward the
possibility of destroying the world we have. [3]

India honored me with three doctorates, from Allahabad, Benares,
and Calcutta representatives of Islam, of Hinduism, and of British-
Indian medicine and science. It was a little too much of a good
thing, and I needed a retreat. A ten-day spell in the hospital offered

it to me, for in Calcutta I finally came down with dysentery. This was
a blessed island in the wild sea of new impressions, and I found a
place to stand on from which I could contemplate the ten thousand
things and their bewildering turmoil.

When I returned to the hotel, in tolerably good health, I had a dream
so characteristic that I wish to set it down here. I found myself, with a
large number of my Zurich friends and acquaintances, on an
unknown island, presumably situated not far off the coast of
southern England. It was small and almost uninhabited. The island
was narrow, a strip of land about twenty miles long, running in a
north-south direction. On the rocky coast at the southern end of the
island was a medieval castle.

3 On the problem of the imitatio, cf. Psychology and Alchemy, Part I (CW
12).

We stood in its courtyard, a group of sightseeing tourists. Before us
rose an imposing 'belfroi', through whose gate a wide stone
staircase was visible. We could just manage to see that it
terminated above in a columned hall. This hall was dimly illuminated
by candlelight. I understood that this was the castle of the Grail, and
that this evening there would be a "celebration of the Grail" here.
This information seemed to be of a secret character, for a German
professor among us, who strikingly resembled old Mommsen, knew
nothing about it. I talked most animatedly with him, and was
impressed by his learning and sparkling intelligence. Only one thing
disturbed me: he spoke constantly about a dead past and lectured
very learnedly on the relationship of the British to the French
sources of the Grail story. Apparently he was not conscious of the
meaning of the legend, nor of its living presentness, whereas I was
intensely aware of both. Also, he did not seem to perceive our
immediate, actual surroundings, for he behaved as though he were
in a classroom, lecturing to his students. In vain I tried to call his

attention to the peculiarity of the situation. He did not see the stairs
or the festive glow in the hall.

I looked around somewhat helplessly, and discovered that I was
standing by the wall of a tall castle; the lower portion of the wall was
covered by a kind of trellis, not made of the usual wood, but of black
iron artfully formed into a grapevine com- plete with leaves, twining
tendrils, and grapes. At intervals of six feet on the horizontal
branches were tiny houses, likewise of iron, like birdhouses.
Suddenly I saw a movement in the foliage; at first it seemed to be
that of a mouse, but then I saw distinctly a tiny, iron, hooded gnome,
a cucullatus, scurrying from one little house to the next. "Well," I
exclaimed in astonishment to the professor, "now look at that, will
you..."

At that moment a hiatus occurred, and the dream changed. We-the
same company as before, but without the professor- were outside
the castle, in a treeless, rocky landscape. 1 knew that something
had to happen, for the Grail was not yet in the castle and still had to
be celebrated that same evening. It was said to be in the northern
part of the island, hidden in a small, uninhabited house, the only
house there. I knew that it was our task to bring the Grail to the
castle. There were about six of us who set out and tramped
northward.

After several hours of strenuous hiking, we reached the narrowest
part of the island, and I discovered that the island was actually
divided into two halves by an arm of the sea. At the smallest part of
this strait the width of the water was about a hundred yards. The sun
had set, and night descended. Wearily, we camped on the ground.
The region was unpopulated and desolate; far and wide there was
not a tree or shrub, nothing but grass and rocks. There was no
bridge, no boat. It was very cold; my companions fell asleep, one
after the other. I considered what could be done, and came to the

conclusion that I alone must swim across the channel and fetch the
Grail. I took off my clothes. At that point I awoke.

Here was this essentially European dream emerging when I had
barely worked my way out of the overwhelming mass of Indian
impressions. Some ten years before, I had discovered that in many
places in England the myth of the Grail was still a living thing, in
spite of all the scholarship that has accumulated around this
tradition. This fact had impressed me all the more when I realized
the concordance between this poetic myth and what alchemy had to
say about the unum vas, the una medicina, and the unus lapis.
Myths which day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and
powerful figures which consciousness has reduced to banality and
ridiculous triviality are recognized again by poets and prophetically
revived; therefore they can also be recognized "in changed form" by
the thoughtful person. The great ones of the past have not died, as
we think; they have merely changed their names. "Small and slight,
but great in might," the veiled Kabir enters a new house.

Imperiously, the dream wiped away all the intense impressions of
India and swept me back to the too-long-neglected concerns of the
Occident, which had formerly been expressed in the quest for the
Holy Grail as well as in the search for the philosophers' stone. I was
taken out of the world of India, and reminded that India was not my
task, but only a part of the way -admittedly a significant one which
should carry me closer to my goal. It was as though the dream were
asking me, "What are you doing in India? Rather seek for yourself
and your fellows the healing vessel, the servator mundi, which you
urgently need. For your state is perilous; you are all in imminent
danger of destroying all that centuries have built up."

Ceylon, the last stage of my journey, struck me as no longer India;
there is already something of the South Seas about it, and a touch
of paradise, in which one cannot linger too long. Colombo is a busy

international port where every day between five and six o'clock a
massive downpour descends from a clear sky. We soon left it
behind and headed for the hilly country of the interior. There Kandy,
the old royal city, is swathed in a fine mist whose tepid humidity
sustains a luxuriant vegetation. The Dalada-Maligawa Temple,
which contains the relic of the Holy Tooth (of Buddha), is small, but
radiates a special charm. I spent a considerable time in its library,
talking with the monks, and looking at the texts of the Buddhist
canon engraved on silver leaves.

There I witnessed a memorable evening ceremony. Young men and
girls poured out enormous mounds of jasmine flowers in front of the
altars, at the same time singing a prayer under their breath: a
mantram. I thought they were praying to Buddha, but the monk who
was guiding me explained, "No, Buddha is no more; He is in
nirvana; we cannot pray to him. They are singing: This life is
transitory as the beauty of these flowers. May my God [4] share with
me the merit of this offering.' "

As a prelude to the ceremony a one-hour drum concert was
performed in the mandapam, or what in Indian temples is called the
hall of waiting. There were five drummers; one stood in each corner
of the square hall, and the fifth, a young man, stood in the middle.
He was the soloist, and a very fine drummer. Naked to the waist, his
dark-brown trunk glistening, with a red girdle, white shoka (a long
skirt reaching to the feet), and white turban, arms covered with
shining bracelets, he stepped up to the golden Buddha, bearing a
double drum, "to sacrifice the music." There, with beautiful
movements of body and arms, he drummed alone a strange
melody, artistically perfect. I watched

4 God = deva = guardian angel,
him from behind; he stood in front of the entrance to the mandapam,

which was covered with little oil lamps. The drum speaks the
ancient language of the belly and solar plexus; the belly does not
"pray" but engenders the "meritorious" mantram or meditative
utterance. It is therefore not adoration of a non-existent Buddha, but
one of the many acts of self-redemption performed by the
awakened human being.

Toward the beginning of spring I set out on my homeward voyage,
with such a plethora of impressions that I did not have any desire to
leave the ship to see Bombay. Instead, I buried myself in my Latin
alchemical texts. But India did not pass me by without a trace; it left
tracks which lead from one infinity into another infinity.

v. Ravenna And Rome

Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb
of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually
fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same
feeling. Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla
Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred. I was there with an
acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the
Baptistery of the Orthodox.

Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room;
yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its
source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did
not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the
windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were
now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it
seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so
unreliable. The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism
in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage
of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third, on the east,
soon faded from my memory. It might have shown Naaman being

cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; there was a picture on this theme
in the old Merian Bible in my library, which was much like the
mosaic.

The fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most
impressive of all. We looked at this one last. It represented Christ
holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves.
We stopped in front of this mosaic for at least twenty minutes and
discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious
archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with real peril of
death. Such initiations were often connected with the peril of death
and so served to express the archetypal idea of death and rebirth.
Baptism had originally been a real submersion which at least
suggested the danger of drowning.

I retained the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking,
and to this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the
sea, individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scrolls
proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ, which I attempted
to decipher. After we left the baptistery, I went promptly to Alinari to
buy photographs of the mosaics, but could not find any. Time was
pressing this was only a short visit and so I postponed the purchase
until later. I thought I might order the pictures from Zurich.

When 1 was back home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to
Ravenna to obtain the pictures for me. He could not locate them, for
he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist.

Meanwhile, I had already spoken at a seminar about the original
conception of baptism, and on this occasion had also mentioned
the mosaics that I had seen in the Baptistery of the Orthodox. [5]
The memory of those pictures is still vivid to me. The lady who had
been there with me long refused to believe that what she had "seen
with her own eyes" had not existed.

As we know, it is very difficult to determine whether, and to what
extent, two persons simultaneously see the same thing. In this case,
however, I was able to ascertain that at least the main features of
what we both saw had been the same.

This experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events in
my life. It can scarcely be explained. A certain light may possibly be
cast on it by an incident in the story of Empress

5 Tantra Yoga Seminar, 1932.

Galla Placidia (d. 450). During a stormy crossing from Byzantium to
Ravenna in the worst of winter, she made a vow that if she came
through safely, she would build a church and have the perils of the
sea represented in it. She kept this vow by building the basilica of
San Giovanni in Ravenna and having it adorned with mosaics. In
the early Middle Ages, San Giovanni, together with its mosaics,
was destroyed by fire; but in the Ambrosiana in Milan is still to be
found a sketch representing Galla Placidia in a boat.

I had, from the first visit, been personally affected by the figure of
Galla Placidia, and had often wondered how it must have been for
this highly cultivated, fastidious woman to live at the side of a
barbarian prince. Her tomb seemed to me a final legacy through
which I might reach her personality. Her fate and her whole being
were vivid presences to me; with her intense nature, she was a
suitable embodiment for my anima. [6]

The anima of a man has a strongly historical character. As a
personification of the unconscious she goes back into prehistory,
and embodies the contents of the past. She provides the individual
with those elements that he ought to know about his pre-history. To
the individual, the anima is all life that has been in the past and is
still alive in him. In comparison to her I have always felt myself to be

a barbarian who really has no history like a creature just sprung out
of nothingness, with neither a past nor a future.

In the course of my confrontation with the anima I had actually had a
brush with those perils which I saw represented in the mosaics. I
had come close to drowning. The same thing happened to me as to
Peter, who cried for help and was rescued by Jesus. What had
been the fate of Pharaoh's army could have been mine. Like Peter
and like Naaman, I came away unscathed, and the integration of the
unconscious contents made an essential contribution to the
completion of my personality.

6 Jung himself explained the vision as a momentary new creation
by the unconscious, arising out of his thoughts about archetypal
initiation. The immediate cause of the concretization lay, in his
opinion, in a projection of his anima upon Galla Placidia. A. J.

What happens within oneself when one integrates previously
unconscious contents with the consciousness is something which
can scarcely be described in words. It can only be experienced. It is
a subjective affair quite beyond discussion; we have a particular
feeling about ourselves, about the way we are, and that is a fact
which it is neither possible nor meaningful to doubt. Similarly, we
convey a particular feeling to others, and that too is a fact that
cannot be doubted. So far as we know, there is no higher authority
which could eliminate the probable discrepancies between all these
impressions and opinions. Whether a change has taken place as
the result of integration, and what the nature of that change is,
remains a matter of subjective conviction. To be sure, it is not a fact
which can be scientifically verified and therefore finds no place in
an official view of the world. Yet it nevertheless remains a fact which
is in practice uncommonly important and fraught with
consequences. Realistic psychotherapists, at any rate, and
psychologists interested in therapy, can scarcely afford to overlook

facts of this sort.

Since my experience in the baptistery in Ravenna, I know with
certainty that something interior can seem to be exterior, and that
something exterior can appear to be interior. The actual walls of the
baptistery, though they must have been seen by my physical eyes,
were covered over by a vision of some altogether different sight
which was as completely real as the unchanged baptismal font.
Which was real at that moment?

My case is by no means the only one of its kind. But when that sort
of thing happens to oneself, one cannot help taking it more
seriously than something heard or read about. In general, with
anecdotes of that kind, one is quick to think of all sorts of
explanations which dispose of the mystery. I have come to the
conclusion that before we settle upon any theories in regard to the
unconscious, we require many, many more experiences of it.

I have traveled a great deal in my life, and I should very much have
liked to go to Rome, but I felt that I was not really up to the
impression the city would have made upon me. Pompeii alone was
more than enough; the impressions very nearly exceeded my
powers of receptivity. I was able to visit Pompeii only after I had
acquired, through my studies of 1910 to 1912, some insight into the
psychology of classical antiquity. In 1912 I was on a ship sailing
from Genoa to Naples. As the vessel neared the latitude of Rome, I
stood at the railing. Out there lay Rome, the still smoking and fiery
hearth from which ancient cultures had spread, enclosed in the
tangled rootwork of the Christian and Occidental Middle Ages.
There classical antiquity still lived in all its splendor and
ruthlessness.

I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for
example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these

other cities can be enjoyed esthetically; but if you are affected to the
depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if
a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a
face instantly recognized, then it becomes another matter entirely.
Even in Pompeii unforeseen vistas opened, unexpected things
became conscious, and questions were posed which were beyond
my powers to handle.

In my old age in 1949 I wished to repair this omission, but was
stricken with a faint while I was buying tickets. After that, the plans
for a trip to Rome were once and for all laid aside.

Visions

A THE BEGINNING of 1944 I broke my foot, and this misadventure
was followed by a heart attack. In a state of unconsciousness I
experienced deliriums and visions which must have begun when I
hung on the edge of death and was being given oxygen and
camphor injections. The images were so tremendous that I myself
concluded that I was close to death. My nurse afterward told me, "It
was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow" That was a
phenomenon she had sometimes observed in the dying, she
added. I had reached the outermost limit, and do not know whether I
was in a dream or an ecstasy. At any rate, extremely strange things
began to happen to me.

It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the
globe of the earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep
blue sea and the continents. Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in
the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of
vision did not include the whole earth, but its global shape was
plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam
through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed
colored, or spotted dark green like oxydized silver. Far away to the
left lay a broad expanse the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was
as though the silver of the earth had there assumed a reddish-gold
hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back as if in the upper left
of a map I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze
was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared
indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered Himalayas, but in that

direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to the right at all. I
knew that I was on the point of departing from the earth.

Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have
so extensive a view approximately a thousand miles! The sight of
the earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever
seen.

After contemplating it for a while, I turned around. I had been
standing with my back to the Indian Ocean, as it were, and my face
to the north. Then it seemed to me that I made a turn to the south.
Something new entered my field of vision. A short distance away I
saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It
was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in
space, and I myself was floating in space.

I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. They
were blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had been hollowed
out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic dark block. An
entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of the entrance,
a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He
wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. Two steps led
up to this antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the
temple. Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity
filled with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door
with a wreath of bright flames. I had once actually seen this when I
visited the Temple of the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate
had been framed by several rows of burning oil lamps of this sort.

As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock,
a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was
being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or
thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or
was stripped from me an extremely painful process. Nevertheless

something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me
everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had
happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I
consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history, and
I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. "I am this bundle of what
has been, and what has been accomplished."

This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the
same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted
or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and
lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been
stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence.
Everything seemed to be past; what remained was a fait accompli,
without any reference back to what had been. There was no longer
any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away.
On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was everything.

Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I
had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and
would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There
I would at last understand this too was a certainty what historical
nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me,
why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. My life as
I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning
and no end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an
excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing.
My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events,
and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken
this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with
me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I
would receive an answer to all these questions as soon as I entered
the rock temple. There I would learn why everything had been thus
and not otherwise. There I would meet the people who knew the
answer to my question about what had been before and what would

come after.

While I was thinking over these matters, something happened that
caught my attention. From below, from the direction of Europe, an
image floated up. It was my doctor, Dr. H. or, rather, his likeness
framed by a golden chain or a golden laurel wreath. I knew at once:
"Aha, this is my doctor, of course, the one who has been treating
me. But now he is coming in his primal form, as a basileus of
Kos.[1] In life he was an avatar of this basileus, the temporal
embodiment of the primal form, which has existed from the
beginning. Now he is appearing in that primal form".

Presumably I too was in my primal form, though this was something
I did not observe but simply took for granted. As he stood before
me, a mute exchange of thought took place between us. Dr. H. had
been delegated by the earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me
that there was a protest against my going away, I had no right to
leave the earth and must return. The moment I heard that, the vision
ceased.

I was profoundly disappointed, for now it all seemed to have been
for nothing. The painful process of defoliation had been in vain, and
I was not to be allowed to enter the temple, to join the people in
whose company I belonged.

In reality, a good three weeks were still to pass before I could truly
make up my mind to live again. I could not eat because all food
repelled me. The view of city and mountains from my sickbed
seemed to me like a painted curtain with black holes in it, or a
tattered sheet of newspaper full of photographs that meant nothing.
Disappointed, I thought, "Now I must return to the 'box system'
again." For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos
a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which
each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to

convince myself all over again that this was important! Life and the
whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond
measure that I should again be finding all that quite in order. I had
been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I along
with everyone else would again be hung up in a box by a thread.
While I floated in space, I had been weightless, and there had been
nothing tugging at me. And now all that was to be a thing of the
past!

1 Basileus king. Kos was famous in antiquity as the site of the temple of
Asklepios, and was the birthplace of Hippocrates. A. J.

I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me
back to life. At the same time, I was worried about him. "His life is in
danger, for heaven's sake! He has appeared to me in his primal
form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die,
for already he belongs to the 'greater company'!" Suddenly the
terrifying thought came to me that Dr. H. would have to die in my
stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not
understand me. Then I became angry with him. "Why does he
always pretend he doesn't know he is a basileus of Kos? And that
he has already assumed his primal form? He wants to make me
believe that he doesn't know!" That irritated me. My wife reproved
me for being so unfriendly to him. She was right; but at the time I
was angry with him for stubbornly refusing to speak of all that had
passed between us in my vision. "Damn it all, he ought to watch his
step. He has no right to be so reckless! I want to tell him to take
care of himself." I was firmly convinced that his life was in jeopardy.

In actual fact I was his last patient. On April 4, 1944 I still remember
the exact date I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the
first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day
Dr. H. took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that he was
having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he died of

septicemia. He was a good doctor; there was something of the
genius about him. Otherwise he would not have appeared to me as
a prince of Kos.

During those weeks I lived in a strange rhythm. By day I was usually
depressed. I felt weak and wretched, and scarcely dared to stir.
Gloomily, I thought, "Now I must go back to this drab world." Toward
evening I would fall asleep, and my sleep would last until about
midnight. Then I would come to myself and lie awake for about an
hour, but in an utterly transformed state. It was as if I were in an
ecstasy. I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were
safe in the womb of the universe in a tremendous void, but filled
with the highest possible feeling of happiness. "This is eternal
bliss," I thought. "This cannot be described; it is far too wonderful!"

Everything around me seemed enchanted. At this hour of the night
the nurse brought me some food she had warmed for only then was
I able to take any, and I ate with appetite. For a time it seemed to
me that she was an old Jewish woman, much older than she
actually was, and that she was preparing ritual kosher dishes for
me. When I looked at her, she seemed to have a blue halo around
her head. I myself was, so it seemed, in the Pardes Rimmonim, the
garden of pomegranates, [2] and the wedding of Tifereth with
Malchuth was taking place. Or else I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai,
whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated. It was the
mystic marriage as it appears in the Cabbalistic tradition. I cannot
tell you how wonderful it was. I could only think continually, "Now this
is the garden of pomegranates! Now this is the marriage of
Malchuth with Tifereth!" I do not know exactly what part I played in it.
At bottom it was I myself: I was the marriage. And my beatitude was
that of a blissful wedding.

Gradually the garden of pomegranates faded away and changed.
There followed the Marriage of the Lamb, in a Jerusalem festively

bedecked. I cannot describe what it was like in detail. These were
ineffable states of joy. Angels were present, and light. I myself was
the "Marriage of the Lamb."

That, too, vanished, and there came a new image, the last vision. I
walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain of hills
began. The valley ended in a classical amphi-theater. It was
magnificently situated in the green landscape. And there, in this
theater, the hierosgamos was being celebrated. Men and women
dancers came onstage, and upon a flower-decked couch All-father
Zeus and Hera consummated the mystic marriage, as it is
described in the Iliad.

All these experiences were glorious. Night after night I floated in a
state of purest bliss, "thronged round with images of all creation."
[3] Gradually, the motifs mingled and paled. Usually the visions
lasted for about an hour; then I would fall asleep again. By the time
morning drew near, I would feel: Now gray morning is coming again;
now comes the gray world with its boxes! What idiocy, what
hideous nonsense! Those inner states were so fantastically
beautiful that by comparison this world appeared downright
ridiculous. As I approached closer to life again, they grew fainter,
and scarcely three weeks after the first vision they ceased
altogether.

2 Pardes Rimmonim is the title of an old Cabbalistic tract by Moses
Cordovero (sixteenth century). In Cabbalistic doctrine Malchuth and THereth
are two of the ten spheres of divine manifestation in which God emerges
from his hidden state. They represent the female and male principles within
the Godhead.

3 Faust, Part Two.

It is impossible to convey the beauty and intensity of emotion during
those visions. They were the most tremendous things I have ever

experienced. And what a contrast the day was: I was tormented and
on edge; everything irritated me; everything was too material, too
crude and clumsy, terribly limited both spatially and spiritually. It was
all an imprisonment, for reasons impossible to divine, and yet it had
a kind of hypnotic power, a cogency, as if it were reality itself, for all
that I had clearly perceived its emptiness. Although my belief in the
world returned to me, I have never since entirely freed myself of the
impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted
in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

There is something else I quite distinctly remember. At the
beginning, when I was having the vision of the garden of
pomegranates, I asked the nurse to forgive me if she were harmed.
There was such sanctity in the room, I said, that it might be harmful
to her. Of course she did not understand me. For me the presence
of sanctity had a magical atmosphere; I feared it might be
unendurable to others. I understood then why one speaks of the
odor of sanctity, of the "sweet smell" of the Holy Ghost. This was it.
There was a pneuma of inexpressible sanctity in the room, whose
manifestation was the mysterium coniunctionis.

I would never have imagined that any such experience was
possible. It was not a product of imagination. The visions and
experiences were utterly real; there was nothing subjective about
them; they all had a quality of absolute objectivity.

We shy away from the word "eternal," but I can describe the
experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which
present, past, and future are one. Everything that happens in time
had been brought together into a concrete whole. Nothing was
distributed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal
concepts. The experience might best be defned as a state of
feeling, but one which cannot be produced by imagination. How can
I imagine that I exist simultaneously the day before yesterday, today,

and the day after tomorrow? There would be things which would not
yet have begun, other things which would be indubitably present,
and others again which would already be finished and yet all this
would be one. The only thing that feeling could grasp would be a
sum, an iridescent whole, containing all at once expectation of a
beginning, surprise at what is now happening, and satisfaction or
disappointment with the result of what has happened. One is
interwoven into an indescribable whole and yet observes it with
complete objectivity.

I experienced this objectivity once again later on. That was after the
death of my wife. I saw her in a dream which was like a vision. She
stood at some distance from me, looking at me squarely. She was
in her prime, perhaps about thirty, and wearing the dress which had
been made for her many years before by my cousin the medium. It
was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever worn. Her
expression was neither joyful nor sad, but, rather, objectively wise
and understanding, without the slightest emotional reaction, as
though she were beyond the mist of affects. I knew that it was not
she, but a portrait she had made or commissioned for me. It
contained the beginning of our relationship, the events of fifty-three
years of marriage, and the end of her life also. Face to face with
such wholeness one remains speechless, for it can scarcely be
comprehended.

The objectivity which I experienced in this dream and in the visions
is part of a completed individuation. It signifies detachment from
valuations and from what we call emotional ties. In general,
emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still
contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections
in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional
relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and
constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that
makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden

behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be
the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real
coniunctio possible.

After the illness a fruitful period of work began for me. A good many
of my principal works were written only then. The insight I had had,
or the vision of the end of all things, gave me the courage to
undertake new formulations. I no longer attempted to put across my
own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts.
Thus one problem after the other revealed itself to me and took
shape.

Something else, too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate
it as an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional "yes" to
that which is, without subjective protests acceptance of the
conditions of existence as I see them and understand them,
acceptance of my own nature, as I happen to be. At the beginning
of the illness I had the feeling that there was something wrong with
my attitude, and that I was to some extent responsible for the
mishap. But when one follows the path of individuation, when one
lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life
would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee not for a
single moment that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly
peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road
of death. Then nothing happens any longer at any rate, not the right
things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.

It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to
affirm one's own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not
break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that
endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with
the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to
experience victory. Nothing is disturbed neither inwardly nor
outwardly, for one's own continuity has withstood the current of life

and of time. But that can come to pass only when one does not
meddle inquisitively with the workings of fate.

I have also realized that one must accept the thoughts that go on
within oneself of their own accord as part of one's reality. The
categories of true and false are, of course, always present; but
because they are not binding they take second place. The
presence of thoughts is more important than our subjective
judgment of them. But neither must these judgments be
suppressed, for they also are existent thoughts which are part of our
wholeness.

XI

On Life after Death

WHAT I HAVE to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death,
consists entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of
thoughts which have buffeted me. These memories in a way also
underlie my works; for the latter are fundamentally nothing but
attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer to the question of the
interplay between the "here" and the "hereafter." Yet I have never
written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had
to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it
may, I would like to state my ideas now.

Even now I can do no more than tell stories "mythologize." Perhaps
one has to be close to death to acquire the necessary freedom to
talk about it. It is not that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I
would prefer not to foster such ideas. Still, I must state, to give
reality its due, that, without my wishing and without my doing
anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within me. I
can't say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they
are there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of
some prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon
of psychic life. And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I
can set it right out of superior knowledge. Critical rationalism has
apparently eliminated, along with so many other mythic
conceptions, the idea of life after death. This could only have
happened because nowadays most people identify themselves
almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they
are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a

smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is.
Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they
pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be
discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as
impossible. Our concepts of space and time have only approximate
validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major
deviations. In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange
myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events
that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my
theoretical postulates.

Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays.
He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes
him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of
incomprehensible things. Such talk is like the telling of a good ghost
story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe.

What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean, or
what kind of reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. We
cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their
indubitable value as anthropomorphic projections. Rather, we must
hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way for us to attain
certainty concerning things which pass our understanding.

We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the
reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to
shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We
are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our
whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be
sure, demands a "going beyond all that" but scientific man cannot
permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation.
To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives
existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is
there any good reason why we should.

Parapsychology holds it to be a scientifically valid proof of an
afterlife that the dead manifest themselves either as ghosts, or
through a medium and communicate things which they alone could
possibly know. But even though there do exist such well-
documented cases, the question remains whether the ghost or the
voice is identical with the dead person or is a psychic projection,
and whether the things said really derive from the deceased or from
knowledge which may be present in the unconscious. [1]

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these
matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great
deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity
beyond their present existence. They live more sensibly, feel better,
and are more at peace. One has centuries, one has an
inconceivable period of time at one's disposal. What then is the
point of this senseless mad rush?

Naturally, such reasoning does not apply to everyone. There are
people who feel no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the
thought of sitting on a cloud and playing the harp for ten thousand
years! There are also quite a few who have been so buffeted by life,
or who feel such disgust for their own existence, that they far prefer
absolute cessation to continuance. But in the majority of cases the
question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so
ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view
about it. But how?

My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us
from the unconscious in dreams, for example. Usually we dismiss
these hints because we are convinced that the question is not
susceptible to answer. In response to this understandable
skepticism, I suggest the following considerations. If there is
something we cannot know, we must necessarily abandon it as an

intellectual problem. For example, I do not know for what reason the
universe has come into being, and shall never know,

1 Concerning "absolute knowledge" in the unconscious, cf. "Synchronicity:
An Acausal Connecting Principle" in The Structure and Dynamics of the
Psyche (CW8),pp.48i ff.

Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual
problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me in dreams or in
mythic traditions I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a
conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever
remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved.

A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a
conception of life after death, or to create some image of it-even if
he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For
the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of
humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself
to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the
boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only
the known and that too with limitations and live in a known
framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends. As a
matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our
consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious
is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates,
the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the
unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making
conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this
in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the
individual is pauperized.

The unconscious helps by communicating things to us, or making
figurative allusions. It has other ways, too, of informing us of things
which by all logic we could not possibly know. Consider

synchronistic phenomena, premonitions, and dreams that come
true. I recall one time during the Second World War when I was
returning home from Bollingen. I had a book with me, but could not
read, for the moment the train started to move I was overpowered
by the image of someone drowning. This was a memory of an
accident that had happened while I was on military service. During
the entire journey I could not rid myself of it. It struck me as uncanny,
and I thought, "What has happened? Can there have been an
accident?"

I got out at Erlenbach and walked home, still troubled by this
memory. My second daughters children were in the garden. The
family was living with us, having returned to Switzerland from Paris
because of the war. The children stood looking rather upset, and
when I asked, "Why, what is the matter?" they told me that Adrian,
then the youngest of the boys, had fallen into the water in the
boathouse. It is quite deep there, and since he could not really swim
he had almost drowned. His older brother had fished him out. This
had taken place at exactly the time I had been assailed by that
memory in the train. The unconscious had given me a hint. Why
should it not be able to inform me of other things also?

I had a somewhat similar experience before a death in my wife's
family. I dreamed that my wife's bed was a deep pit with stone
walls. It was a grave, and somehow had a suggestion of classical
antiquity about it. Then I heard a deep sigh, as if someone were
giving up the ghost. A figure that resembled my wife sat up in the pit
and floated upward. It wore a white gown into which curious black
symbols were woven. I awoke, roused my wife, and checked the
time. It was three o'clock in the morning. The dream was so curious
that I thought at once that it might signify a death. At seven o'clock
came the news that a cousin of my wife had died at three o'clock in
the morning.

Frequently foreknowledge is there, but not recognition. Thus I once
had a dream in which I was attending a garden party. I saw my
sister there, and that greatly surprised me, for she had died some
years before. A deceased friend of mine was also present. The rest
were people who were still alive. Presently I saw that my sister was
accompanied by a lady I knew well. Even in the dream I had drawn
the conclusion that the lady was going to die. "She is already
marked," I thought. In the dream I knew exactly who she was. I knew
also that she lived in Basel. But as soon as I woke up I could no
longer, with the best will in the world, recall who she was, although
the whole dream was still vivid in my mind. I pictured all my
acquaintances in Basel to see whether the memory images would
ring a bell. Nothing!

A few weeks later I received news that a friend of mine had had a
fatal accident. I knew at once that she was the person I had seen in
the dream but had been unable to identify. My recollection of her
was perfectly clear and richly detailed, since she had been my
patient for a considerable time up to a year before her death. In my
attempt to recall the person in my dream, however, hers was the
one picture which did not appear in my portrait gallery of Basel
acquaintances, although by rights it should have been one of the
first.

When one has such experiences and I will tell of others like them
one acquires a certain respect for the potentialities and arts of the
unconscious. Only, one must remain critical and be aware that such
communications may have a subjective meaning as well. They may
be in accord with reality, and then again they may not. I have,
however, learned that the views I have been able to form on the
basis of such hints from the unconscious have been most
rewarding. Naturally, I am not going to write a book of revelations
about them, but I will acknowledge that I have a "myth" which
encourages me to look deeper into this whole realm. Myths are the

earliest form of science. When I speak of things after death, I am
speaking out of inner prompting, and can go no farther than to tell
you dreams and myths that relate to this subject.

Naturally, one can contend from the start that myths and dreams
concerning continuity of life after death are merely compensating
fantasies which are inherent in our natures all life desires eternity.
The only argument I can adduce in answer to this is the myth itself.

However, there are indications that at least a part of the psyche is
not subject to the laws of space and time. Scientific proof of that
has been provided by the well-known J. B. Rhine experiments. [2]
Along with numerous cases of spontaneous foreknowledge, non-
spatial perceptions, and so on of which I have given a number of
examples from my own life-these experiments prove that the
psyche at times functions outside of the spatio-temporal law of
causality. This indicates that our conceptions of space and time,
and therefore of causality also, are incomplete. A complete picture
of the world would require the addition of still another dimension;
only then could the totality of phenomena be given a unified
explanation. Hence it is that

3 Extra-sensory Perception (Boston, 1934); The Reach of the Mind (New
York, 1947).

the rationalists insist to this day that parapsychological experiences
do not really exist; for their world-view stands or falls by this
question. If such phenomena occur at all, the rationalistic picture of
the universe is invalid, because incomplete. Then the possibility of
an other-valued reality behind the phenomenal world becomes an
inescapable problem, and we must face the fact that our world, with
its time, space, and causality, relates to another order of things
lying behind or beneath it, in which neither "here and there" nor
"earlier and later" are of importance. I have been convinced that at

least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity
of space and time. This relativity seems to increase, in proportion
to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of
timelessness and spacelessness.

Not only my own dreams, but also occasionally the dreams of
others, helped to shape, revise, or confirm my views on a life after
death. I attach particular importance to a dream which a pupil of
mine, a woman of sixty, dreamed about two months before her
death. She had entered the hereafter. There was a class going on,
and various deceased women friends of hers sat on the front
bench. An atmosphere of general expectation prevailed. She
looked around for a teacher or lecturer, but could find none. Then it
became plain that she herself was the lecturer, for immediately after
death people had to give accounts of the total experience of their
lives. The dead were extremely interested in the life experiences
that the newly deceased brought with them, just as if the acts and
experiences taking place in earthly life, in space and time, were the
decisive ones.

In any case, the dream describes a most unusual audience whose
like could scarcely be found on earth: people burningly interested in
the final psychological results of a human life that was in no way
remarkable, any more than were the conclusions that could be
drawn from it to our way of thinking. If, however, the "audience"
existed in a state of relative non-time, where "termination" "event,"
and "development" had become questionable concepts, they might
very well be most interested precisely in what was lacking in their
own condition.

At the time of this dream the lady was afraid of death and did her
best to fend off any thoughts about it. Yet death is an important
interest, especially to an aging person. A categorical question is
being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this

end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason shows him
nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however,
can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures
of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them
with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as
wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the
man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has
placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives
right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the
one lives against his instincts, the other with them.

The figures from the unconscious are uninformed too, and need
man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain to knowledge.
When I began working with the unconscious, I found myself much
involved with the figures of Salome and Elijah. Then they receded,
but after about two years they reappeared. To my enormous
astonishment, they were completely unchanged; they spoke and
acted as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile. In actuality the
most incredible things had taken place in my life. I had, as it were,
to begin from the beginning again, to tell them all about what had
been going on, and explain things to them. At the time I had been
greatly surprised by this situation. Only later did I understand what
had happened: in the interval the two had sunk back into the
unconscious and into themselves I might equally well put it, into
timelessness. They remained out of contact with the ego and the
ego's changing circumstances, and therefore were ignorant of what
had happened in the world of consciousness.

Quite early I had learned that it was necessary for me to instruct the
figures of the unconscious, or that other group which is often
indistinguishable from them, the "spirits of the departed." The first
time I experienced this was on a bicycle trip through upper Italy
which I took with a friend in 1 91 1 . On the way home we cycled from
Pavia to Arona, on the lower part of Lake Maggiore, and spent the

night there. We had intended to pedal on along the lake and then
through the Tessin as far as Faido, where we were going to take
the train to Zurich. But in Arona I had a dream which upset our
plans.

In the dream I was in an assemblage of distinguished spirits of
earlier centuries; the feeling was similar to the one I had later
toward the "illustrious ancestors" in the black rock temple of my
1944 vision. The conversation was conducted in Latin. A gentleman
with a long, curly wig addressed me and asked a difficult question,
the gist of which I could no longer recall after I woke up. I understood
him, but did not have a sufficient command of the language to
answer him in Latin. I felt so profoundly humiliated by this that the
emotion awakened me.

At the very moment of awakening I thought of the book I was then
working on, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, and had such
intense inferiority feelings about the unanswered question that I
immediately took the train home in order to get back to work. It
would have been impossible for me to continue the bicycle trip and
lose another three days. I had to work, to find the answer.

Not until years later did I understand the dream and my reaction.
The bewigged gentleman was a kind of ancestral spirit, or spirit of
the dead, who had addressed questions to me in vain! It was still
too soon, I had not yet come so far, but I had an obscure feeling that
by working on my book I would be answering the question that had
been asked. It had been asked by, as it were, my spiritual
forefathers, in the hope and expectation that they would learn what
they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since
the answer had first to be created in the centuries that followed. If
question and answer had already been in existence in eternity, had
always been there, no effort on my part would have been necessary,
and it could all have been discovered in any other century. There

does seem to be unlimited knowledge present in nature, it is true,
but it can be comprehended by consciousness only when the time
is ripe for it. The process, presumably, is like what happens in the
individual psyche: a man may go about for many years with an
inkling of something, but grasps it clearly only at a particular
moment.

Later, when I wrote the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, once again
it was the dead who addressed crucial questions to me. They came
so they said "back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they
sought." This had surprised me greatly at the time, for according to
the traditional views the dead are the possessors of great
knowledge. People have the idea that the dead know far more than
we, for Christian doctrine teaches that in the hereafter we shall "see
face to face." Apparently, however, the souls of the dead "know"
only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond
that. Hence their endeavor to penetrate into life in order to share in
the knowledge of men. I frequently have a feeling that they are
standing directly behind us, waiting to hear what answer we will give
to them, and what answer to destiny. It seems to me as if they were
dependent on the living for receiving answers to their questions,
that is, on those who have survived them and exist in a world of
change: as if omniscience or, as I might put it, omni-consciousness,
were not at their disposal, but could flow only into the psyche of the
living, into a soul bound to a body. The mind of the living appears,
therefore, to hold an advantage over that of the dead in at least one
point: in the capacity for attaining clear and decisive cognitions. As
I see it, the three-dimensional world in time and space is like a
system of co-ordinates; what is here separated into ordinates and
abscissae may appear "there," in space-timelessness, as a
primordial image with many aspects, perhaps as a diffuse cloud of
cognition surrounding an archetype. Yet a system of co-ordinates is
necessary if any distinction of discrete contents is to be possible.

Any such operation seems to us unthinkable in a state of diffuse
omniscience, or, as the case may be, of subjectless
consciousness, with no spatio-temporal demarcations. Cognition,
like generation, presupposes an opposition, a here and there, an
above and below, a before and after.

If there were to be a conscious existence after death, it would, so it
seems to me, have to continue on the level of consciousness
attained by humanity, which in any age has an upper though
variable limit. There are many human beings who throughout their
lives and at the moment of death lag behind their own potentialities
and even more important behind the knowledge which has been
brought to consciousness by other human beings during their own
lifetimes. Hence their demand to attain in death that share of
awareness which they failed to win in life.

I have come to this conclusion through observation of dreams about
the dead. I dreamed once that I was paying a visit to a friend who
had died about two weeks before. In life, this friend had never
espoused anything but a conventional view of the world, and had
remained stuck in this unreflecting attitude. In the dream his home
was on a hill similar to the Tullinger hill near Basel. The walls of an
old castle surrounded a square consisting of a small church and a
few smaller buildings. It reminded me of the square in front of the
castle of Rapperswil. It was autumn. The leaves of the ancient trees
had turned gold, and the whole scene was transfigured by gentle
sunlight. My friend sat at a table with his daughter, who had studied
psychology in Zurich. I knew that she was telling him about
psychology. He was so fascinated by what she was saying that he
greeted me only with a casual wave of the hand, as though to
intimate: "Don't disturb me." The greeting was at the same time a
dismissal. The dream told me that now, in a manner which of
course remains incomprehensible to me, he was required to grasp
the reality of his psychic existence, which he had never been

capable of doing during his life.

I had another experience of the evolution of the soul after death
when about a year after my wife's death I suddenly awoke one night
and knew that I had been with her in the south of France, in
Provence, and had spent an entire day with her. She was engaged
on studies of the Grail there. That seemed significant to me, for she
had died before completing her work on this subject. Interpretation
on the subjective level that my anima had not yet finished with the
work she had to do yielded nothing of interest; I know quite well that
I am not yet finished with that. But the thought that my wife was
continuing after death to work on her further spiritual development
however that may be conceived struck me as meaningful and held a
measure of reassurance for me.

Ideas of this sort are, of course, inaccurate, and give a wrong
picture, like a body projected on a plane or, conversely, like the
construction of a four-dimensional model out of a three-dimensional
body. They use the terms of a three-dimensional world in order to
represent themselves to us. Mathematics goes to great pains to
create expressions for relationships which pass empirical
comprehension. In much the same way, it is all-important for a
disciplined imagination to build up images of intangibles by logical
principles and on the basis of empirical data, that is, on the
evidence of dreams. The method employed is what I have called
"the method of the necessary statement." It represents the principle
of amplification in the interpretation of dreams, but can most easily
be demonstrated by the statements implicit in simple whole
numbers.

One, as the first numeral, is unity. But it is also "the unity," the One,
All-Oneness, individuality and non-duality not a numeral but a
philosophical concept, an archetype and attribute of God, the
monad. It is quite proper that the human intellect should make these

statements; but at the same time the intellect is determined and
limited by its conception of oneness and its implications. In other
words, these statements are not arbitrary. They are governed by the
nature of oneness and therefore are necessary statements.
Theoretically, the same logical operation could be performed for
each of the following conceptions of number, but in practice the
process soon comes to an end because of the rapid increase in
complications, which become too numerous to handle.

Every further unit introduces new properties and new modifications.
Thus, it is a property of the number four that equations of the fourth
degree can be solved, whereas equations of the fifth degree
cannot. The necessary statement of the number four, therefore, is
that, among other things, it is an apex and simultaneously the end of
a preceding ascent. Since with each additional unit one or more
new mathematical properties appear, the statements attain such a
complexity that they can no longer be formulated.

The infinite series of natural numbers corresponds to the infinite
number of individual creatures. That series likewise consists of
individuals, and the properties even of its first ten members
represent if they represent anything at all an abstract cosmogony
derived from the monad. The properties of numbers are, however,
simultaneously properties of matter, for which reason certain
equations can anticipate its behavior.

Therefore I submit that other than mathematical statements (i.e.,
statements implicit in nature) are likewise capable of pointing to
irrepresentable realities beyond themselves such, for example, as
those products of the imagination which enjoy universal acceptance
or are distinguished by the frequency of their occurrence, like the
whole class of archetypal motifs. Just as in the case of some
factors in mathematical equations we cannot say to what physical
realities they correspond, so in the case of some mythological

products we do not know at first to what psychic realities they refer.
Equations governing the turbulence of heated gases existed long
before the problems of such gases had been precisely
investigated. Similarly, we have long been in possession of
mythologems which express the dynamics of certain subliminal
processes, though these processes were only given names in very
recent times.

The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere
forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the
dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great
significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at
the time of his death is so important. Only here, in life on earth,
where the opposites clash together, can the general level of
consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical
task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing." Myth is
the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between
unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows
more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special
sort, knowledge in eternity, usually without reference to the here and
now, not couched in language of the intellect. Only when we let its
statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the
example of numerals, does it come within the range of our
understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to
us. This process is convincingly repeated in every successful
dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any
preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by
dreams. As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes
us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence
sterile.

Although there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of
the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which
make us thoughtful. I take them as hints, and do not presume to

ascribe to them the significance of insights.

One night I lay awake thinking of the sudden death of a friend
whose funeral had taken place the day before. I was deeply
concerned. Suddenly I felt that he was in the room. It seemed to me
that he stood at the foot of my bed and was asking me to go with
him. I did not have the feeling of an apparition; rather, it was an
inner visual image of him, which I explained to myself as a fantasy.
But in all honesty I had to ask myself, "Do I have any proof that this
is a fantasy? Suppose it is not a fantasy, suppose my friend is really
here and I decided he was only a fantasy would that not be
abominable of me?" Yet I had equally little proof that he stood
before me as an apparition. Then I said to myself, "Proof is neither
here nor there! Instead of explaining him away as a fantasy, I might
just as well give him the benefit of the doubt and for experiment's
sake credit him with reality." The moment I had that thought, he went
to the door and beckoned me to follow him. So I was going to have
to play along with him! That was something I hadn't bargained for. I
had to repeat my argument to myself once more. Only then did I
follow him in my imagination.

He led me out of the house, into the garden, out to the road, and
finally to his house, (In reality it was several hundred yards away
from mine.) I went in, and he conducted me into his study. He
climbed on a stool and showed me the second of five books with
red bindings which stood on the second shelf from the top. Then the
vision broke off. I was not acquainted with his library and did not
know what books he owned. Certainly I could never have made out
from below the titles of the books he had pointed out to me on the
second shelf from the top.

This experience seemed to me so curious that next morning I went
to his widow and asked whether I could look up something in my
friend's library. Sure enough, there was a stool standing under the

bookcase I had seen in my vision, and even before I came closer I
could see the five books with red bindings. I stepped up on the stool
so as to be able to read the titles. They were translations of the
novels of Emile Zola. The title of the second volume read: "The
Legacy of the Dead." The contents seemed to me of no interest.
Only the title was extremely significant in connection with this
experience.

Equally important to me were the dream-experiences I had before
my mother's death. News of her death came to me while I was
staying in the Tessin. I was deeply shaken, for it had come with
unexpected suddenness. The night before her death I had a
frightening dream. I was in a dense, gloomy forest; fantastic,
gigantic boulders lay about among huge jungle-like trees. It was a
heroic, primeval landscape. Suddenly I heard a piercing whistle that
seemed to resound through the whole universe. My knees shook.
Then there were crashings in the underbrush, and a gigantic
wolfhound with a fearful, gaping maw burst forth. At the sight of it,
the blood froze in my veins. It tore past me, and I suddenly knew: the
Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul. I
awoke in deadly terror, and the next morning I received the news of
my mother's passing.

Seldom has a dream so shaken me, for upon superficial
consideration it seemed to say that the devil had fetched her. But to
be accurate the dream said that it was the Wild Huntsman, the
"Grunhutl" or Wearer of the Green Hat, who hunted with his wolves
that night it was the season of Fohn storms in January. It was
Wotan, the god of my Alemannic forefathers, who had gathered my
mother to her ancestors negatively to the "wild horde," but positively
to the "salig lut" the blessed folk. It was the Christian missionaries
who made Wotan into a devil. In himself he is an important god-a
Mercury or Hermes, as the Romans correctly realized, a nature
spirit who returned to life again in the Merlin of the Grail legend and

became, as the spiritus Mercurialis, the sought-after arcanum of the
alchemists. Thus the dream says that the soul of my mother was
taken into that greater territory of the self which lies beyond the
segment of Christian morality, taken into that wholeness of nature
and spirit in which conflicts and contradictions are resolved.

I went home immediately, and while I rode in the night train I had a
feeling of great grief, but in my heart of hearts 1 could not be
mournful, and this for a strange reason: during the entire journey I
continually heard dance music, laughter, and jollity, as though a
wedding were being celebrated. This contrasted violently with the
devastating impression the dream had made on me. Here was gay
dance music, cheerful laughter, and it was impossible to yield
entirely to my sorrow. Again and again it was on the point of
overwhelming me, but the next moment I would find myself once
more engulfed by the merry melodies. One side of me had a feeling
of warmth and joy, and the other of terror and grief; I was thrown
back and forth between these contrasting emotions.

This paradox can be explained if we suppose that at one moment
death was being represented from the point of view of the ego, and
at the next from that of the psyche. In the first case it appeared as a
catastrophe; that is how it so often strikes us, as if wicked and
pitiless powers had put an end to a human life.

And so it is death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality; there is no
sense pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event,
but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us,
and what remains is the icy stillness of death. There no longer
exists any hope of a relationship, for all the bridges have been
smashed at one blow. Those who deserve a long life are cut off in
the prime of their years, and good-for-nothings live to a ripe old
age. This is a cruel reality which we have no right to sidestep. The
actual experience of the cruelty and wantonness of death can so

embitter us that we conclude there is no merciful God, no justice,
and no kindness.

From another point of view, however, death appears as a joyful
event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding, a mysterium
coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it
achieves wholeness. On Greek sarcophagi the joyous element was
represented by dancing girls, on Etruscan tombs by banquets.
When the pious Cabbalist Rabbi Simon ben Jochai came to die,
his friends said that he was celebrating his wedding. To this day it
is the custom in many regions to hold a picnic on the graves on All
Souls' Day. Such customs express the feeling that death is really a
festive occasion.

Several months before my mother's death, in September 1922, I
had a dream which presaged it. It concerned my father, and made a
deep impression upon me. I had not dreamed of my father since his
death in 1896. Now he once more appeared in a dream, as if he
had returned from a distant journey. He looked rejuvenated, and
had shed his appearance of paternal authoritarianism. I went into
my library with him, and was greatly pleased at the prospect of
finding out what he had been up to. I was also looking forward with
particular joy to introducing my wife and children to him, to showing
him my house, and to telling him all that had happened to me and
what I had become in the meanwhile. I wanted also to tell him about
my book on psychological types, which had recently been
published. But I quickly saw that all this would be inopportune, for
my father looked preoccupied. Apparently he wanted something
from me. I felt that plainly, and so I refrained from talking about my
own concerns.

He then said to me that since I was after all a psychologist, he
would like to consult me about marital psychology. I made ready to
give him a lengthy lecture on the complexities of marriage, but at

this point I awoke. I could not properly understand the dream, for it
never occurred to me that it might refer to my mother's death. I
realized that only when she died suddenly in January 1923.

My parents' marriage was not a happy one, but full of trials and
difficulties and tests of patience. Both made the mistakes typical of
many couples. My dream was a forecast of my mother's death, for
here was my father who, after an absence of twenty-six years,
wished to ask a psychologist about the newest insights and
information on marital problems, since he would soon have to
resume this relationship again. Evidently he had acquired no better
understanding in his timeless state and therefore had to appeal to
someone among the living who, enjoying the benefits of changed
times, might have a fresh approach to the whole thing.

Such was the dream's message. Undoubtedly, I could have found
out a good deal more by looking into its subjective meaning but why
did I dream it just before the death of my mother, which I did not
foresee? It plainly referred to my father, with whom I felt a sympathy
that deepened as I grew older.

Since the unconscious, as the result of its spatio-temporal relativity,
possesses better sources of information than the conscious mind
which has only sense perceptions available to it we are dependent
for our myth of life after death upon the meager hints of dreams and
similar spontaneous revelations from the unconscious. As I have
already said, we cannot attribute to these allusions the value of
knowledge, let alone proof. They can, however, serve as suitable
bases for mythic amplifications; they give the probing intellect the
raw material which is indispensable for its vitality. Cut off the
intermediary world of mythic imagination, and the mind falls prey to
doctrinaire rigidities. On the other hand, too much traffic with these
germs of myth is dangerous for weak and suggestible minds, for
they are led to mistake vague intimations for substantial knowledge,

and to hypostatize mere phantasms.

One widespread myth of the hereafter is formed by the ideas and
images centering on reincarnation. In one country whose intellectual
culture is highly complex and much older than ours I am, of course,
referring to India the idea of reincarnation is as much taken for
granted as, among us, the idea that God created the world, or that
there is a spiritus rector. Cultivated Hindus know that we do not
share their ideas about this, but that does not trouble them. In
keeping with the spirit of the East, the succession of birth and death
is viewed as an endless continuity, as an eternal wheel rolling on
forever without a goal, Man lives and attains knowledge and dies
and begins again from the beginning. Only with the Buddha does
the idea of a goal emerge, namely, the overcoming of earthly
existence.

The mythic needs of the Occidental call for an evolutionary
cosmogony with a beginning and a goal. The Occidental rebels
against a cosmogony with a beginning and mere end, just as he
cannot accept the idea of a static, self-contained, eternal cycle of
events. The Oriental, on the other hand, seems able to come to
terms with this idea. Apparently there is no unanimous feeling about
the nature of the world, any more than there is general agreement
among contemporary astronomers on this question. To Western
man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is
unbearable. He must assume that it has meaning. The Oriental
does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself
embodies it. Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete
the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfillment of
meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself
(Buddha).

I would say that both are right. Western man seems predominantly
extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted. The former

projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the
latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both without
and within.

The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma. The crucial
question is whether a man's karma is personal or not. If it is, then
the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an
achievement of previous lives, and a personal continuity therefore
exists. If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is
seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again
without there being any personal continuity.

Buddha was twice asked by his disciples whether man's karma is
personal or not. Each time he fended off the question, and did not
go into the matter; to know this, he said, would not contribute to
liberating oneself from the illusion of existence. Buddha considered
it far more useful for his disciples to meditate upon the Nidana
chain, that is, upon birth, life, old age, and death, and upon the
cause and effect of suffering.

I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is
the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the
achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in
me. Am I a combination of the lives of these ancestors and do I
embody these lives again? Have I lived before in the past as a
specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life that I am
now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question
open, and I like to assume that he himself did not know with
certainty.

I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and
there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had
to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given
to me. When I die, my deeds will follow along with me that is how I

imagine it. I will bring with me what I have done. In the meantime it is
important to insure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.
Buddha, too, seems to have had this thought when he tried to keep
his disciples from wasting time on useless speculation.

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question
to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to
the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am
dependent upon the world's answer. That is a suprapersonal life
task, which I accomplish only by effort and with difficulty. Perhaps it
is a question which preoccupied my ancestors, and which they
could not answer. Could that be why I am so impressed by the fact
that the conclusion of Faust contains no solution? Or by the problem
on which Nietzsche foundered: the Dionysian side of life, to which
the Christian seems to have lost the way? Or is it the restless
Wotan-Hermes of my Alemannic and Prankish ancestors who
poses challenging riddles?

What I feel to be the resultant of my ancestors' lives, or a karma
acquired in a previous personal life, might perhaps equally well be
an impersonal archetype which today presses hard on everyone
and has taken a particular hold upon me an archetype such as, for
example, the development over the centuries of the divine triad and
its confrontation with the feminine principle; or the still pending
answer to the Gnostic question as to the origin of evil, or, to put it
another way, the incompleteness of the Christian God-image.

I also think of the possibility that through the achievement of an
individual a question enters the world, to which he must provide
some kind of answer. For example, my way of posing the question
as well as my answer may be unsatisfactory. That being so,
someone who has my karma or I myself would have to be reborn in
order to give a more complete answer. It might happen that I would
not be reborn again so long as the world needed no such answer,

and that I would be entitled to several hundred years of peace until
someone was once more needed who took an interest in these
matters and could profitably tackle the task anew. I imagine that for
a while a period of rest could ensue, until the stint I had done in my
lifetime needed to be taken up again.

The question of karma is obscure to me, as is also the problem of
personal rebirth or of the transmigration of souls. "With a free and
open mind" I listen attentively to the Indian doctrine of rebirth, and
look around in the world of my own experience to see whether
somewhere and somehow there is some authentic sign pointing
toward reincarnation. Naturally, I do not count the relatively
numerous testimonies, here in the West, to the belief in
reincarnation. A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief,
not the content of the belief. This I must see revealed empirically in
order to accept it. Until a few years ago I could not discover
anything convincing in this respect, although I kept a sharp lookout
for any such signs. Recently, however, I observed in myself a series
of dreams which would seem to describe the process of
reincarnation in a deceased person of my acquaintance. But I have
never come across any such dreams in other persons, and
therefore have no basis for comparison. Since this observation is
subjective and unique, I prefer only to mention its existence and not
to go into it any further. I must confess, however, that after this
experience I view the problem of reincarnation with somewhat
different eyes, though without being in a position to assert a definite
opinion.

If we assume that life continues "there," we cannot conceive of any
other form of existence except a psychic one; for the life of the
psyche requires no space and no time. Psychic existence, and
above all the inner images with which we are here concerned,
supply the material for all mythic speculations about a life in the
hereafter, and I imagine that life as a continuance in the world of

images. Thus the psyche might be that existence in which the
hereafter or the land of the dead is located.

From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would
seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With
increasing age, contemplation, and reflection, the inner images
naturally play an ever greater part in man's life. "Your old men shall
dream dreams". [3] That, to be sure, presupposes that the psyches
of the old men have not become wooden, or entirely petrified sera
medicina paratur cum mala per longas convaluere moras. [4] In old
age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye and,
musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of the
past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just
as, in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death.

The inner images keep me from getting lost in personal
retrospection. Many old people become too involved in their
reconstruction of past events. They remain imprisoned in these
memories. But if it is reflective and is translated into images,
retrospection can be a reculer pour mieux sauter. I try to see the line
which leads through my life into the world, and out of the world
again.

In general, the conception people form of the hereafter is largely
made up of wishful thinking and prejudices. Thus in most
conceptions the hereafter is pictured as a pleasant place. That
does not seem so obvious to me. I hardly think that after death we
shall be spirited to some lovely flowering meadow. If everything
were pleasant and good in the hereafter, surely there would be
some friendly communication between us and the blessed spirits,
and an outpouring upon us of goodness and beauty from the
prenatal state. But there is nothing of the sort. Why is there this
insurmountable barrier between the departed and the living? At
least half the reports of encounters with the dead tell of terrifying

experiences with dark spirits; and it is the rule that the land of the
dead observes icy silence, unperturbed by the grief of the
bereaved.

3 Acts 2:17; Joel 2:28.

4 The medicine is prepared too late, when the illness has grown strong by
long delay.

To follow out the thought that involuntarily comes to me: the world, I
feel, is far too unitary for there to be a hereafter in which the rule of
opposites is completely absent. There, too, is nature, which after its
fashion is also God's. The world into which we enter after death will
be grand and terrible, like God and like all of nature that we know.
Nor can I conceive that suffering should entirely cease. Granted that
what I experienced in my 1944 visions liberation from the burden of
the body, and perception of meaning gave me the deepest bliss.
Nevertheless, there was darkness too, and a strange cessation of
human warmth. Remember the black rock to which I came! It was
dark and of the hardest granite. What does that mean? If there were
no imperfections, no primordial defect in the ground of creation,
why should there be any urge to create, any longing for what must
yet be fulfilled? Why should the gods be the least bit concerned
about man and creation? About the continuation of the Nidana
chain to infinity? After all, the Buddha opposes to the painful illusion
of existence his quod non, and the Christian hopes for the swift
coming of this world's end.

It seems probable to me that in the hereafter, too, there exist certain
limitations, but that the souls of the dead only gradually find out
where the limits of the liberated state lie. Somewhere "out there"
there must be a determinant, a necessity conditioning the world,
which seeks to put an end to the after-death state. This creative
determinant so I imagine it must decide what souls will plunge
again into birth. Certain souls, I imagine, feel the state of three-

dimensional existence to be more blissful than that of Eternity. But
perhaps that depends upon how much of completeness or
incompleteness they have taken across with them from their human
existence.

It is possible that any further spell of three-dimensional life would
have no more meaning once the soul had reached a certain stage
of understanding; it would then no longer have to return, fuller
understanding having put to rout the desire for re-embodiment.
Then the soul would vanish from the three-dimensional world and
attain what the Buddhists call nirvana. But if a karma still remains to
be disposed of, then the soul relapses again into desires and
returns to life once more, perhaps even doing so out of the
realization that something remains to be completed.

In my case it must have been primarily a passionate urge toward
understanding which brought about my birth. For that is the
strongest element in my nature. This insatiable drive toward
understanding has, as it were, created a consciousness in order to
know what is and what happens, and in order to piece together
mythic conceptions from the slender hints of the unknowable.

We lack concrete proof that anything of us is preserved for eternity.
At most we can say that there is some probability that something of
our psyche continues beyond physical death. Whether what
continues to exist is conscious of itself, we do not know either. If we
feel the need to form some opinion on this question, we might
possibly consider what has been learned from the phenomena of
psychic dissociation. In most cases where a split-off complex
manifests itself it does so in the form of a personality, as if the
complex had a consciousness of itself. Thus the voices heard by
the insane are personified. 1 dealt long ago with this phenomenon of
personified complexes in my doctoral dissertation. We might, if we
wish, adduce these complexes as evidence for a continuity of

consciousness. Likewise in favor of such an assumption are certain
astonishing observations in cases of profound syncope after acute
injuries to the brain and in severe states of collapse. In both
situations, total loss of consciousness can be accompanied by
perceptions of the outside world and vivid dream experiences.
Since the cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness, is not
functioning at these times, there is as yet no explanation for such
phenomena. They may be evidence for at least a subjective
persistence of the capacity for consciousness even in a state of
apparent unconsciousness. [5] The thorny problem of the
relationship between eternal man, the self and earthly man in time
and space was illuminated by two dreams of mine.

5 Cf . "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," in The Structure
and Dynamics of the Psyche ( CW 8 ) , pp. 506 ff.

In one dream, which I had in October 1958, I caught sight from my
house of two lens-shaped metallically gleaming disks, which hurtled
in a narrow arc over the house and down to the lake. They were two
UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). Then another body came flying
directly toward me. It was a perfectly circular lens, like the objective
of a telescope. At a distance of four or five hundred yards it stood
still for a moment, and then flew off. Immediately afterward, another
came speeding through the air: a lens with a metallic extension
which led to a box a magic lantern. At a distance of sixty or seventy
yards it stood still in the air, pointing straight at me. I awoke with a
feeling of astonishment. Still half in the dream, the thought passed
through my head: "We always think that the UFOs are projections of
ours. Now it turns out that we are their projections. I am projected by
the magic lantern as C. G. Jung. But who manipulates the
apparatus?"

I had dreamed once before of the problem of the self and the ego.
In that earlier dream I was on a hiking trip. I was walking along a

little road through a hilly landscape; the sun was shining and I had a
wide view in all directions. Then I came to a small wayside chapel.
The door was ajar, and I went in. To my surprise there was no
image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a
wonderful flower arrangement. But then I saw that on the floor in
front of the altar, facing me, sat a yogi in lotus posture, in deep
meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he
had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought:
"Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I
am it." I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.

I had this dream after my illness in 1944. It is a parable: My self
retires into meditation and meditates my earthly form. To put it
another way: it assumes human shape in order to enter three-
dimensional existence, as if someone were putting on a diver's suit
in order to dive into the sea. When it renounces existence in the
hereafter, the self assumes a religious posture, as the chapel in the
dream shows. In earthly form it can pass through the experiences of
the three-dimensional world, and by greater awareness take a
further step toward realization.

The figure of the yogi, then, would more or less represent my
unconscious prenatal wholeness, and the Far East, as is often the
case in dreams, a psychic state alien and opposed to our own. Like
the magic lantern, the yogi's meditation "projects" my empirical
reality. As a rule, we see this causal relationship in reverse: in the
products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is,
circular and quaternary figures which express wholeness, and
whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such
figures. Our basis is ego-consciousness, our world the field of light
centered upon the focal point of the ego. From that point we look
out upon an enigmatic world of obscurity, never knowing to what
extent the shadowy forms we see are caused by our
consciousness, or possess a reality of their own. The superficial

observer is content with the first assumption. But closer study
shows that as a rule the images of the unconscious are not
produced by consciousness, but have a reality and spontaneity of
their own, Nevertheless, we regard them as mere marginal
phenomena.

The aim of both these dreams is to effect a reversal of the
relationship between ego-consciousness and the unconscious, and
to represent the unconscious as the generator of the empirical
personality. This reversal suggests that in the opinion of the "other
side," our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious
world a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific
purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it.
It is clear that this state of affairs resembles very closely the Oriental
conception of Maya. [6]

Unconscious wholeness therefore seems to me the true spiritus
rector of all biological and psychic events. Here is a principle which
strives for total realization which in man's case signifies the
attainment of total consciousness. Attainment of consciousness is
culture in the broadest sense, and self-knowledge is therefore the
heart and essence of this process. The Oriental attributes
unquestionably divine significance to the self, and according to the
ancient Christian view self-knowledge is the road to knowledge of
God.

6Atendency to question the locus of reality manifested itself early in Jung's
life, when as a child he sat upon the stone and toyed with the idea that the
stone was saying, or was, "I." Cf. the well-known butterfly dream in
Chuangtzu. A. J.

The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite
or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the
thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our

interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of
real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us
recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions:
our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false
possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential,
the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has
limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand
and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite,
desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for
something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do
not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men,
too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is
expressed in the relationship.

The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are
bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the "self;
it is manifested in the experience: "I am only that!" Only
consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link
to the limitlessness of the unconscious. In such awareness we
experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both
the one and the other. In knowing ourselves to be unique in our
personal combination that is, ultimately limited we possess also the
capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!

In an era which has concentrated exclusively upon extension of
living space and increase of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a
supreme challenge to ask man to become conscious of his
uniqueness and his limitation. Uniqueness and limitation are
synonymous. Without them, no perception of the unlimited is
possible-and, consequently, no coming to consciousness either-
merely a delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication
with large numbers and an avidity for political power.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus

brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The
phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought
springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence
by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has
fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact
opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward
from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his
unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious
elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create
more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole
purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of
mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious
affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the
unconscious.

XII

Late Thoughts

ANY BIOGRAPHY of myself , must, I think, take account of the
following reflections. It is true that they may well strike others as
highly theoretical, but making "theory" [1] of this sort is as much a
part of me, as vital a function of mine, as eating and drinking.

What is remarkable about Christianity is that in its system of dogma
it anticipates a metamorphosis in the divinity, a process of historic
change on the "other side." It does this in the form of the new myth
of dissension in heaven, first alluded to in the creation myth in which
a serpent-like antagonist of the Creator appears, and lures man to
disobedience by the promise of increased conscious knowledge
(scientes bonum et malum), The second allusion is to the fall of the
angels, a premature invasion of the human world by unconscious
contents. The angels are a strange genus: they are precisely what
they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves
soulless beings who

1 In the original sense of the Greek theorein, 'looking about the world," or
the German Weltanschauung. A. J.

represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord.
Angels who fall, then, are exclusively "bad" angels. These release
the well-known effect of "inflation" which we can also observe
nowadays in the megalomania of dictators: the angels beget with
men a race of giants which ends by threatening to devour mankind,
as is told in the book of Enoch.

The third and decisive stage of the myth, however, is the self-
realization of God in human form, in fulfillment of the Old Testament

idea of the divine marriage and its consequences. As early as the
period of primitive Christianity, the idea of the incarnation had been
refined to include the intuition of "Christ within us." Thus the
unconscious wholeness penetrated into the psychic realm of inner
experience, and man was made aware of all that entered into his
true configuration. This was a decisive step, not only for man, but
also for the Creator Who, in the eyes of those who had been
delivered from darkness, cast off His dark qualities and became
the summum bonum.

This myth remained unassailably vital for a millennium until the first
signs of a further transformation of consciousness began appearing
in the eleventh century. [2] From then on, the symptoms of unrest
and doubt increased, until at the end of the second millennium the
outlines of a universal catastrophe became apparent, at first in the
form of a threat to consciousness. This threat consists in giantism in
other words, a hubris of consciousness in the assertion: "Nothing is
greater than man and his deeds." The otherworldliness, the
transcendence of the Christian myth was lost, and with it the view
that wholeness is achieved in the other world.

Light is followed by shadow, the other side of the Creator. This
development reached its peak in the twentieth century. The
Christian world is now truly confronted by the principle of evil, by
naked injustice, tyranny, lies, slavery, and coercion of conscience.
This manifestation of naked evil has assumed apparently
permanent form in the Russian nation; but its first violent eruption
came in Germany. That outpouring of evil revealed to what extent
Christianity has been undermined in

2 See Aion ( CW 9, u), pp. 8a ff.

the twentieth century. In the face of that, evil can no longer be
minimized by the euphemism of the privatio boni. Evil has become

a determinant reality. It can no longer be dismissed from the world
by a circumlocution. We must learn how to handle it, since it is here
to stay. How we can live with it without terrible consequences
cannot for the present be conceived.

In any case, we stand in need of a reorientation, a metanoia.
Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it. We
must, therefore, no longer succumb to anything at all, not even to
good. A so-called good to which we succumb loses its ethical
character. Not that there is anything bad in it on that score, but to
have succumbed to it may breed trouble. Every form of addiction is
bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or
idealism. We must beware of thinking of good and evil as absolute
opposites. The criterion of ethical action can no longer consist in
the simple view that good has the force of a categorical imperative,
while so-called evil can resolutely be shunned. Recognition of the
reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise,
converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.

In practical terms, this means that good and evil are no longer so
self-evident. We have to realize that each represents a judgment. In
view of the fallibility of all human judgment, we cannot believe that
we will always judge rightly. We might so easily be the victims of
misjudgment. The ethical problem is affected by this principle only
to the extent that we become somewhat uncertain about moral
evaluations. Nevertheless we have to make ethical decisions. The
relativity of "good" and "evil" by no means signifies that these
categories are invalid, or do not exist. Moral judgment is always
present and carries with it characteristic psychological
consequences. I have pointed out many times that as in the past, so
in the future the wrong we have done, thought, or intended will
wreak its vengeance on our souls. Only the contents of judgment
are subject to the differing conditions of time and place and,
therefore, take correspondingly different forms. For moral

evaluation is always founded upon the apparent certitudes of a
moral code which pretends to know precisely what is good and
what evil. But once we know how uncertain the foundation is, ethical
decision becomes a subjective, creative act. We can convince
ourselves of its validity only Deo concedente that is, there must be a
spontaneous and decisive impulse on the part of the unconscious.
Ethics itself, the decision between good and evil, is not affected by
this impulse, only made more difficult for us. Nothing can spare us
the torment of ethical decision. Nevertheless, harsh as it may
sound, we must have the freedom in some circumstances to avoid
the known moral good and do what is considered to be evil, if our
ethical decision so requires. In other words, again: we must not
succumb to either of the opposites. A useful pattern is provided by
the neti-neti of Indian philosophy. In given cases, the moral code is
undeniably abrogated and ethical choice is left to the individual. In
itself there is nothing new about this idea; in pre-psychology days
such difficult choices were also known and came under the heading
of "conflict of duties"

As a rule, however, the individual is so unconscious that he
altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision. Instead he
is constantly and anxiously looking around for external rules and
regulations which can guide him in his perplexity. Aside from
general human inadequacy, a good deal of the blame for this rests
with education, which promulgates the old generalizations and says
nothing about the secrets of private experience. Thus, every effort is
made to teach idealistic beliefs or conduct which people know in
their hearts they can never live up to, and such ideals are preached
by officials who know that they themselves have never lived up to
these high standards and never will. What is more, nobody ever
questions the value of this kind of teaching.

Therefore the individual who wishes to have an answer to the

problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost,
of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own
wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do,
and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding
the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within
his nature, and both are bound to come to light in him, should he
wish as he ought to live without self-deception or self-delusion.

In general, however, most people are hopelessly ill equipped for
living on this level, although there are also many persons today who
have the capacity for profounder insight into themselves. Such self-
knowledge is of prime importance, because through it we approach
that fundamental stratum or core of human nature where the
instincts dwell. Here are those pre- existent dynamic factors which
ultimately govern the ethical decisions of our consciousness. This
core is the unconscious and its contents, concerning which we
cannot pass any final judgment. Our ideas about it are bound to be
inadequate, for we are unable to comprehend its essence
cognitively and set rational limits to it. We achieve knowledge of
nature only through science, which enlarges consciousness; hence
deepened self-knowledge also requires science, that is,
psychology. No one builds a telescope or microscope with one turn
of the wrist, out of good will alone, without a knowledge of optics.

Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very
existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the
phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing
about man, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture
of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case. We
stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even
know what is before us, let alone what to pit against it. And even if
we did know, we still could not understand "how it could happen
here." With glorious naivete a statesman comes out with the proud
declaration that he has no "imagination for evil". Quite right: we

have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not
want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the
psychological situation in the world today: some call themselves
Christian and imagine that they can trample so-called evil underfoot
by merely willing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see
the good. Evil today has become a visible Great Power. One half of
humanity battens and grows strong on a doctrine fabricated by
human ratiocination; the other half sickens from the lack of a myth
commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come
to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to
develop its myth further in the course of the centuries.

Those who gave expression to the dark stirrings of growth in mythic
ideas were refused a hearing; Gioacchino da Fiore, Meister
Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, and many others have remained
obscurantists for the majority. The only ray of light is Pius XII and his
dogma. [3] But people do not even know what I am referring to
when I say this. They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer
lives and grows.

Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. The fault lies
not in it as it is set down in the Scriptures, but solely in us, who have
not developed it further, who, rather, have suppressed any such
attempts. The original version of the myth offers ample points of
departure and possibilities of development. For example, the words
are put into Christ's mouth: "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and
harmless as doves." For what purpose do men need the cunning of
serpents? And what is the link between this cunning and the
innocence of the dove? "Except ye become as little children..." Who
gives thought to what children are like in reality? By what morality
did the Lord justify the taking of the ass which he needed in order to
ride in triumph into Jerusalem? How was it that, shortly afterward,
he put on a display of childish bad temper and cursed the fig tree?

What kind of morality emerges from the parable of the unjust
steward, and what profound insight, of such far-reaching
significance for our own predicament, from the apocryphal logion:
"Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, thou art blessed; but if thou
knowest not, thou art accursed and a transgressor of the law"? [4]
What, finally, does it mean when St. Paul confesses: "The evil which
I would not, that I do"? I will not discuss the transparent prophecies
of the Book of Revelation, because no one believes in them and the
whole subject is felt to be an embarrassing one.

The old question posed by the Gnostics, "Whence comes evil?"
has been given no answer by the Christian world, and Origen's
cautious suggestion of a possible redemption of the devil was
termed a heresy. Today we are compelled to meet that question;
but we stand empty-handed, bewildered, and perplexed, and
cannot even get it into our heads that no myth will come to our

3 See above, Chap. VII, n. , p. 202.

4 Codex Bezae ad Lucam 6, 4.

aid although we have such urgent need of one. As the result of the
political situation and the frightful, not to say diabolic, triumphs of
science, we are shaken by secret shudders and dark forebodings;
but we know no way out, and very few persons indeed draw the
conclusion that this time the issue is the long-since-forgotten soul of
man.

A further development of myth might well begin with the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, by which they were made into
sons of God, and not only they, but all others who through them and
after them received the filiatio— sonship of God-and thus partook of
the certainty that they were more than autochthonous animalia
sprung from the earth, that as the twice-born they had their roots in
the divinity itself. Their visible, physical life was on this earth; but the

invisible inner man had come from and would return to the
primordial image of wholeness, to the eternal Father, as the
Christian myth of salvation puts it.

Just as the Creator is whole, so His creature, His son, ought to be
whole. Nothing can take away from the concept of divine
wholeness. But unbeknownst to all, a splitting of that wholeness
ensued; there emerged a realm of light and a realm of darkness.
This outcome, even before Christ appeared, was clearly prefigured,
as we may observe inter alia in the experience of Job, or in the
widely disseminated Book of Enoch, which belongs to immediate
pre-Christian times. In Christianity, too, this meta-physical split was
plainly perpetuated: Satan, who in the Old Testament still belonged
to the intimate entourage of Yahweh, now formed the diametrical
and eternal opposite of the divine world. He could not be uprooted.
It is therefore not surprising that as early as the beginning of the
eleventh century the belief arose that the devil, not God, had
created the world. Thus the keynote was struck for the second half
of the Christian aeon, after the myth of the fall of the angels had
already explained that these fallen angels had taught men a
dangerous knowledge of science and the arts. What would these
old storytellers have to say about Hiroshima?

The visionary genius of Jacob Boehme recognized the paradoxical
nature of the God-image and thus contributed to the further
development of the myth. The mandala symbol sketched by
Boehme [5] is a representation of the split God, for the inner circle
is divided into two semicircles standing back to back.

Since dogma holds that God is wholly present in each of the three
Persons, He is also wholly present in each part of the out- poured
Holy Spirit; thus every man can partake of the whole of God and
hence of the filiation. The complexio oppositorum of the God-image
thus enters into man, and not as unity, but as conflict, the dark half of

the image coming into opposition with the accepted view that God
is "Light." This very process is taking place in our own times, albeit
scarcely recognized by the official teachers of humanity whose task,
supposedly, is to understand such matters. There is the general
feeling, to be sure, that we have reached a significant turning point
in the ages, but people imagine that the great change has to do
with nuclear fission and fusion, or with space rockets. What is
concurrently taking place in the human psyche is usually
overlooked.

Insofar as the God-image is, from the psychological point of view, a
manifestation of the ground of the psyche, and insofar as the
cleavage in that image is becoming clear to mankind as a profound
dichotomy which penetrates even into world politics, a
compensation has arisen. This takes the form of circular symbols of
unity which represent a synthesis of the opposites within the
psyche. I refer to the worldwide rumors of Unidentified Flying
Objects, of which we began to hear as early as 1 943. These rumors
are founded either upon visions or upon actual phenomena. The
usual story about the UFOs is that they are some kind of spacecraft
coming from other planets or even from the fourth dimension.

More than twenty years earlier (in 1918), in the course of my
investigations of the collective unconscious, I discovered the
presence of an apparently universal symbol of a similar type the
mandala symbol. To make sure of my case, I spent more than a
decade amassing additional data, before announcing my discovery
for the first time. [6] The mandala is an archetypal image

5 Reproduced in The Archetypes and the Collects Unconscious (CW 9, i),
p. 297.

6 In the commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower ( 1931) (CW 13).
whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the

wholeness of the self. This circular image represents the wholeness
of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity
incarnate in man. In contrast to Boehme's mandala, the modern
ones strive for unity; they represent a compensation of the psychic
cleavage, or an anticipation that the cleavage will be surmounted.
Since this process takes place in the collective unconscious, it
manifests itself everywhere. The worldwide stories of the UFOs are
evidence of that; they are the symptom of a universally present
psychic disposition.

Insofar as analytical treatment makes the "shadow" conscious, it
causes a cleavage and a tension of opposites which in their turn
seek compensation in unity. The adjustment is achieved through
symbols. The conflict between the opposites can strain our psyche
to the breaking point, if we take them seriously, or if they take us
seriously. The tertium non datur of logic proves its worth: no solution
can be seen. If all goes well, the solution, seemingly of its own
accord, appears out of nature. Then and then only is it convincing. It
is felt as "grace" Since the solution proceeds out of the
confrontation and clash of opposites, it is usually an unfathomable
mixture of conscious and unconscious factors, and therefore a
symbol, a coin split into two halves which fit together precisely. [7] It
represents the result of the joint labors of consciousness and the
unconscious, and attains the likeness of the God-image in the form
of the mandala, which is probably the simplest model of a concept
of wholeness, and one which spontaneously arises in the mind as a
representation of the struggle and reconciliation of opposites. The
clash, which is at first of a purely personal nature, is soon followed
by the insight that the subjective conflict is only a single instance of
the universal conflict of opposites. Our psyche is set up in accord
with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the
macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most
subjective reaches of the psyche. For that reason the God-image is

always a projection of the inner experience of a powerful vis-a-vis.
This is symbolized by objects from which

7 One of the meanings of symbolon is the tessera hospitalitatis between
host and guest, the broken coin which is shared between two parting
friends. A. J.

the inner experience has taken its initial impulse, and which from
then on preserve numinous significance, or else it is char- acterized
by its numinosity and the overwhelming force of that numinosity. In
this way the imagination liberates itself from the concretism of the
object and attempts to sketch the image of the invisible as
something which stands behind the phenomenon. I am thinking here
of the simplest basic form of the mandala, the circle, and the
simplest (mental) division of the circle, the quadrant or, as the case
may be, the cross.

Such experiences have a helpful or, it may be, annihilating effect
upon man. He cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them; nor can
he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as
overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his
conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God.
Science employs the term "the unconscious," thus admitting that it
knows nothing about it, for it can know nothing about the substance
of the psyche when the sole means of knowing anything is the
psyche. Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or
God can be neither disproved nor affirmed. We can, however,
establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the
experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche,
is indeed authentic.

We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just
as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an
inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does

happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana,
from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious. The first three terms
have the great merit of including and evoking the emotional quality
of numinosity, whereas the latter the unconscious is banal and
therefore closer to reality. This latter concept includes the empirical
realm that is, the commonplace reality we know so well. The
unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to give much impetus
to the imagination. The term, after all, was coined for scientific
purposes, and is far better suited to dispassionate observation
which makes no meta-physical claims than are the transcendental
concepts, which are controversial and therefore tend to breed
fanaticism.

Hence I prefer the term "the unconscious," knowing that I might
equally well speak of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express
myself in mythic language. When I do use such mythic language, I
am aware that "mana," "daimon," and "God" are synonyms for the
unconscious that is to say, we know just as much or just as little
about them as about the latter. People only believe they know much
more about them and for certain purposes that belief is far more
useful and effective than a scientific concept. The great advantage
of the concepts "daimon" and "God" lies in making possible a
much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely, a personification
of it. Their emotional quality confers life and effectuality upon them.
Hate and love, fear and reverence, enter the scene of the
confrontation and raise it to a drama. What has merely been
"displayed" becomes "acted." [8] The whole man is challenged and
enters the fray with his total reality. Only then can he become whole
and only then can "God be born," that is, enter into human reality
and associate with man in the form of "man." By this act of
incarnation man that is, his ego is inwardly replaced by "God," and
God becomes outwardly man, in keeping with the saying of Jesus:
"Who sees me, sees the Father."

It is at this point that the shortcomings of mythic terminology
become apparent. The Christian's ordinary conception of God is of
an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-merciful Father and Creator of
the world. If this God wishes to become man, an incredible kenosis
(emptying) [9] is required of Him, in order to reduce His totality to
the infinitesimal human scale. Even then it is hard to see why the
human frame is not shattered by the incarnation. Theological
thinkers have therefore felt it necessary to equip Jesus with
qualities which raise him above ordinary human existence. Above
all he lacks the macula peccati (stain of original sin). For that
reason, if for no other, he is at least a god-man or a demigod. The
Christian God-image cannot become incarnate in empirical man
without contradictions quite apart from the fact that man with all his
external characteristics seems little suited to representing a god.

8 Cf. "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," in Psychology and Religion:
West and East (CW1 1 ), pp. 249-50

9 Philippians 2: 6.

The myth must ultimately take monotheism seriously and put aside
its dualism, which, however much repudiated officially, has
persisted until now and enthroned an eternal dark antagonist
alongside the omnipotent Good. Room must be made within the
system for the philosophical complexio oppositorum of Nicholas of
Cusa and the moral ambivalence of Jacob Boehme; only thus can
the One God be granted the wholeness and the synthesis of
opposites which should be His. It is a fact that symbols, by their very
nature, can so unite the opposites that these no longer diverge or
clash, but mutually supplement one another and give meaningful
shape to life. Once that has been experienced, the ambivalence in
the image of a nature-god or Creator-god ceases to present
difficulties. On the contrary, the myth of the necessary incarnation of
God the essence of the Christian message can then be understood
as man's creative confrontation with the opposites and their

synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. The
unavoidable internal contradictions in the image of a Creator-god
can be reconciled in the unity and wholeness of the self as the
coniunctio oppositorum of the alchemists or as a unio mystica. In
the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites "God" and
"man" that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites
within the God-image itself. That is the meaning of divine service, of
the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge
from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His
creation, and man conscious of himself.

That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningfully into the
scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it.
It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in
the course of the decades. It is a goal I can acknowledge and
esteem, and which therefore satisfies me.

By virtue of his reflective faculties, man is raised out of the animal
world, and by his mind he demonstrates that nature has put a high
premium precisely upon the developmerit of consciousness.
Through consciousness he takes possession of nature by
recognizing the existence of the world and thus, as it were,
confirming the Creator. The world becomes the phenomenal world,
for without conscious reflection it would not be. If the Creator were
conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor
is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which
squander millions of years upon the development of countless
species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention.
Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of
species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being
devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate
repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a
different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness
intervenes the second cosmogony. The importance of

consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the
element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the
monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the
road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-
blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain found as if
by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed,
felt and groped for out of some dark urge.

I do not imagine that in my reflections on the meaning of man and
his myth I have uttered a final truth, but I think that this is what can be
said at the end of our aeon of the Fishes, and perhaps must be
said in view of the coming aeon of Aquarius (the Water Bearer),
who has a human figure and is next to the sign of the Fishes. This is
a coniunctio oppositorum composed of two fishes in reverse. The
Water Bearer seems to represent the self. With a sovereign
gesture he pours the contents of his jug into the mouth of Piscis
austrinus which symbolizes a son, a still unconscious content. Out of
this unconscious content will emerge, after the passage of another
aeon of more than two thousand years, a future whose features are
indicated by the symbol of Capricorn: an aigokeros, the monstrosity
of the Goat-Fish, [11] symbolizing the mountains and the depths of
the sea, a polarity

10 Constellation of the "Southern Fish." Its mouth is formed by Fomalhaut
(Arabic for "mouth of the fish" ) below the constellation of the Water Bearer.

11 The constellation of Capricorn was originally called the "Goat-Fish."

made up of two undifferentiated animal elements which have grown
together. This strange being could easily be the primordial image of
a Creator-god confronting "man," the Anthropos. On this question
there is a silence within me, as there is in the empirical data at my
disposal the products of the unconscious of other people with which
I am acquainted, or historical documents. If insight does not come

by itself, speculation is pointless. It makes sense only when we
have objective data comparable to our material on the aeon of
Aquarius.

We do not know how far the process of coming to consciousness
can extend, or where it will lead. It is a new element in the story of
creation, and there are no parallels we can look to. We therefore
cannot know what potentialities are inherent in it. Neither can we
know the prospects for the species Homo sapiens. Will it imitate
the fate of other species, which once flourished on the earth and
now are extinct? Biology can advance no reasons why this should
not be so.

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view
of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human
existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic
wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and
unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is
therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things
endurable perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth,
and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that
"God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in
man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word
of God. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of
distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God.
There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered
known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us
spontaneously and places obligations upon us. It is not affected by
the arbitrary operation of our will. We cannot explain an inspiration.
Our chief feeling about it is that it is not the result of our own
ratiocinations, but that it came to us from elsewhere. And if we
happen to have a precognitive dream, how can we possibly ascribe
it to our own powers? After all, often we do not even know, until
some time afterward, that the dream represented foreknowledge,

or knowledge of something that happened at a distance.

The Word happens to us; we suffer it, for we are victims of a
profound uncertainty: with God as a complexio oppositorum, all
things are possible, in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Truth and
delusion, good and evil, are equally possible. Myth is or can be
equivocal, like the oracle of Delphi or like a dream. We cannot and
ought not to repudiate reason; but equally we must cling to the hope
that instinct will hasten to our aid in which case God is supporting
us against God, as Job long ago understood. Everything through
which the "other will" is expressed proceeds from man his thinking,
his words, his images, and even his limitations. Consequently he
has the tendency to refer everything to himself, when he begins to
think in clumsy psychological terms, and decides that everything
proceeds out of his intentions and out of himself. With childlike
naivete he assumes that he knows all his own reaches and knows
what he is "in himself." Yet all the while he is fatally handicapped by
the weakness of his consciousness and the corresponding fear of
the unconscious. Therefore he is utterly unable to separate what he
has carefully reasoned out from what has spontaneously flowed to
him from another source. He has no objectivity toward himself and
cannot yet regard himself as a phenomenon which he finds in
existence and with which, for better or worse, he is identical. At first
everything is thrust upon him, everything happens to him, and it is
only by great effort that he finally succeeds in conquering and
holding for himself an area of relative freedom.

Only when he has won his way to this achievement, and then only, is
he in a position to recognize that he is confronting his instinctive
foundations, given him from the beginning, which he cannot make
disappear, however much he would like to. His beginnings are not
by any means mere pasts; they live with him as the constant
substratum of his existence, and his consciousness is as much

molded by them as by the physical world around him.

These facts assail man from without and from within with
overwhelming force. He has summed them up under the idea of
divinity, has described their effects with the aid of myth, and has
interpreted this myth as the "Word of God," that is, as the
inspiration and revelation of the numen from the "other side."

There is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of
individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is
pledged to guard. The very beginnings of societal structures reveal
the craving for secret organizations. When no valid secrets really
exist, mysteries are invented or contrived to which privileged
initiates are admitted. Such was the case with the Rosicrucians and
many other societies. Among these pseudo-secrets there are
ironically real secrets of which the initiates are entirely unaware as,
for example, in those societies which borrowed their "secret"
primarily from the alchemical tradition.

The need for ostentatious secrecy is of vital importance on the
primitive level, for the shared secret serves as a cement binding the
tribe together. Secrets on the tribal level constitute a helpful
compensation for lack of cohesion in the individual personality,
which is constantly relapsing into the original unconscious identity
with other members of the group. Attainment of the human goal an
individual who is conscious of his own peculiar nature thus
becomes a long, almost hopeless process of education. For even
the individuals whose initiation into certain secrets has marked
them out in some way are fundamentally obeying the laws of group

identity, though in their case the group is a socially differentiated
one.

The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to
individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective
organization to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not
yet recognized that it is really the individual's task to differentiate
himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective
identities, such as membership in organizations, support of "isms,"
and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective
identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for
the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters
for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom
of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants
and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a
mother providing nourishment and growth. It would therefore be
wrong to regard this intermediary stage as a trap; on the contrary,
for a long time to come it will represent the only possible form of
existence for the individual, who nowadays seems more than ever
threatened by anonymity. Collective organization is still so essential
today that many consider it, with some justification, to be the final
goal; whereas to call for further steps along the road to autonomy
appears like arrogance or hubris, fantasticality, or simply folly.

Nevertheless it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he
must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms. It may
be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life
offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him.
He will go alone and be his own company. He will serve as his own
group, consisting of a variety of opinions and tendencies which
need not necessarily be marching in the same direction. In fact, he
will be at odds with himself, and will find great difficulty in uniting his
own multiplicity for purposes of common action. Even if he is
outwardly protected by the social forms of the intermediary stage,

he will have no defense against his inner multiplicity. The disunion
within himself may cause him to give up, to lapse into identity with
his surroundings.

Like the initiate of a secret society who has broken free from the
undifferentiated collectivity, the individual on his lonely path needs a
secret which for various reasons he may not or cannot reveal. Such
a secret reinforces him in the isolation of his individual aims. A
great many individuals cannot bear this isolation. They are the
neurotics, who necessarily play hide-and-seek with others as well
as with themselves, without being able to take the game really
seriously. As a rule they end by surrendering their individual goal to
their craving for collective conformity a procedure which all the
opinions, beliefs, and ideals of their environment encourage.
Moreover, no rational arguments prevail against the environment.
Only a secret which the individual cannot betray one which he fears
to give away, or which he cannot formulate in words, and which
therefore seems to belong to the category of crazy ideas can
prevent the otherwise inevitable retrogression.

The need for such a secret is in many cases so compelling that the
individual finds himself involved in ideas and actions for which he is
no longer responsible. He is being motivated neither by caprice nor
arrogance, but by a dira necessitas which he himself cannot
comprehend. This necessity comes down upon him with savage
fatefulness, and perhaps for the first time in his life demonstrates to
him ad oculos the presence of something alien and more powerful
than himself in his own most personal domain, where he thought
himself the master. A vivid example is the story of Jacob, who
wrestled with the angel and came away with a dislocated hip, but by
his struggle prevented a murder. In those fortunate days, Jacob's
story was believed without question. A contemporary Jacob, telling
such a tale, would be treated to meaningful smiles. He would prefer

not to speak of such matters, especially if he were inclined to have
his private views about the nature of Yahweh's messenger. Thus he
would find himself willy-nilly in possession of a secret that could not
be discussed, and would become a deviant from the collectivity.
Naturally, his mental reservation would ultimately come to light,
unless he succeeded in playing the hypocrite all his life. But anyone
who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same
time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic. Our modern
Jacob would be concealing from himself the fact that the angel was
after all the stronger of the two as he certainly was, for no claims
were ever made that the angel, too, came away with a limp.

The man, therefore, who, driven by his daimon, steps beyond the
limits of the intermediary stage, truly enters the "untrodden,
untreadable regions". [12] where there are no charted ways and no
shelter spreads a protecting roof over his head. There are no
precepts to guide him when he encounters an unforeseen situation
for example, a conflict of duties. For the most part, these

12 Faust, Part Two.

sallies into no man's land last only as long as no such conflicts
occur, and come swiftly to an end as soon as conflict is sniffed from
afar. I cannot blame the person who takes to his heels at once. But
neither can I approve his finding merit in his weakness and
cowardice. Since my contempt can do him no further harm, I may as
well say that I find nothing praiseworthy about such capitulations.

But if a man faced with a conflict of duties undertakes to deal with
them absolutely on his own responsibility, and before a judge who
sits in judgment on him day and night, he may well find himself in an
isolated position. There is now an authentic secret in his life which
cannot be discussed if only because he is involved in an endless
inner trial in which he is his own counsel and ruthless examiner, and

no secular or spiritual judge can restore his easy sleep. If he were
not already sick to death of the decisions of such judges, he would
never have found himself in a conflict. For such a conflict always
presupposes a higher sense of responsibility. It is this very quality
which keeps its possessor from accepting the decision of a
collectivity. In his case the court is transposed to the inner world
where the verdict is pronounced behind closed doors.

Once this happens, the psyche of the individual acquires
heightened importance. It is not only the seat of his well-known and
socially defined ego; it is also the instrument for measuring what it
is worth in and for itself. Nothing so promotes the growth of
consciousness as this inner confrontation of opposites. Quite
unsuspected facts turn up in the indictment, and the defense is
obliged to discover arguments hitherto unknown. In the course of
this, a considerable portion of the outer world reaches the inner,
and by that very fact the outer world is impoverished or relieved. On
the other hand, the inner world has gained that much weight by
being raised to the rank of a tribunal for ethical decisions. However,
the once unequivocal ego loses the prerogative of being merely the
prosecutor; it must also learn the role of defendant. The ego
becomes ambivalent arid ambiguous, and is caught between
hammer and anvil. It becomes aware of a polarity superordinate to
itself.

By no means every conflict of duties, and perhaps not even a single
one, is ever really "solved," though it may be argued over, weighed,
and counterweighed till doomsday. Sooner or later the decision is
simply there, the product, it would seem, of some kind of short-
circuit. Practical life cannot be suspended in an everlasting
contradiction. The opposites and the contradictions between them
do not vanish, however, even when for a moment they yield before
the impulse to action. They constantly threaten the unity of the
personality, and entangle life again and again in their dichotomies.

Insight into the dangers and the painfulness of such a state might
well decide one to stay at home, that is, never to leave the safe fold
and the warm cocoon, since these alone promise protection from
inner stress. Those who do not have to leave father and mother are
certainly safest with them. A good many persons, however, find
themselves thrust out upon the road to individuation. In no time at all
they will become acquainted with the positive and negative aspects
of human nature.

Just as all energy proceeds from opposition, so the psyche too
possesses its inner polarity, this being the indispensable
prerequisite for its aliveness, as Heraclitus realized long ago. Both
theoretically and practically, polarity is inherent in all living things.
Set against this overpowering force is the fragile unity of the ego,
which has come into being in the course of millennia only with the
aid of countless protective measures. That an ego was possible at
all appears to spring from the fact that all opposites seek to achieve
a state of balance. This happens in the exchange of energy which
results from the collision of hot and cold, high and low, and so on.
The energy underlying conscious psychic life is pre-existent to it
and therefore at first unconscious. As it approaches consciousness
it first appears projected in figures like mana, gods, daimons, etc.,
whose numen seems to be the vital source of energy, and in point
of fact is so as long as these supernatural figures are accepted. But
as these fade and lose their force, the ego that is, the empirical
man seems to come into possession of this source of energy, and
does so in the fullest meaning of this ambiguous statement: on the
one hand he seeks to seize this energy, to possess it, and even
imagines that he does possess it; and on the other hand he is
possessed by it.

This grotesque situation can, to be sure, occur only when the
contents of consciousness are regarded as the sole form of psychic

existence. Where this is the case, there is no preventing inflation by
projections coming home to roost. But where the existence of an
unconscious psyche is admitted, the contents of projection can be
received into the inborn instinctive forms which predate
consciousness. Their objectivity and autonomy are thereby
preserved, and inflation is avoided. The archetypes, which are pre-
existent to consciousness and condition it, appear in the part they
actually play in reality: as a priori structural forms of the stuff of
consciousness. They do not in any sense represent things as they
are in themselves, but rather the forms in which things can be
perceived and conceived. Naturally, it is not merely the archetypes
that govern the particular nature of perceptions. They account only
for the collective component of a perception. As an attribute of
instinct they partake of its dynamic nature, and consequently
possess a specific energy which causes or compels definite
modes of behavior or impulses; that is, they may under certain
circumstances have a possessive or obsessive force (numinosityl).
The conception of them as daimonia is therefore quite in accord
with their nature.

If anyone is inclined to believe that any aspect of the nature of things
is changed by such formulations, he is being extremely credulous
about words. The real facts do not change, whatever names we
give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive
of "God" as "pure Nothingness," that has nothing whatsoever to do
with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much
possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at
all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality
if the new name implies a denial. On the other hand, a positive
name for the unknowable has the merit of putting us into a
correspondingly positive attitude. If, therefore, we speak of "God"
as an "archetype," we are saying nothing about His real nature but
are letting it be known that "God" already has a place in that part of

our psyche which is pre-existent to consciousness and that He
therefore cannot be considered an invention of consciousness. We
neither make Him more remote nor eliminate Him, but bring Him
closer to the possibility of being experienced. This latter
circumstance is by no means unimportant, for a thing which cannot
be experienced may easily be suspected of non-existence. This
suspicion is so inviting that so-called believers in God see nothing
but atheism in my attempt to reconstruct the primitive unconscious
psyche. Or if not atheism, then Gnosticism anything, heaven forbid,
but a psychic reality like the unconscious. If the unconscious is
anything at all, it must consist of earlier evolutionary stages of our
conscious psyche. The assumption that man in his whole glory was
created on the sixth day of Creation, without any preliminary stages,
is after all somewhat too simple and archaic to satisfy us
nowadays. There is pretty general agreement on that score. In
regard to the psyche, however, the archaic conception holds on
tenaciously: the psyche has no antecedents, is a tabula rasa, arises
anew at birth, and is only what it imagines itself to be.

Consciousness is phylogenetically and ontogenetically a secondary
phenomenon. It is time this obvious fact were grasped at last. Just
as the body has an anatomical prehistory of millions of years, so
also does the psychic system. And just as the human body today
represents in each of its parts the result of this evolution, and
everywhere still shows traces of its earlier stages so the same may
be said of the psyche. Consciousness began its evolution from an
animal-like state which seems to us unconscious, and the same
process of differentiation is repeated in every child. The psyche of
the child in its reconscious state is anything but a tabula rasa; it is
already preformed in a recognizably individual way, and is
moreover equipped with all specifically human instincts, as well as
with the a priori foundations of the higher functions.

On this complicated base, the ego arises. Throughout life the ego is

sustained by this base. When the base does not function, stasis
ensues and then death. Its life and its reality are of vital importance.
Compared to it, even the external world is secondary, for what does
the world matter if the endogenous impulse to grasp it and
manipulate it is lacking? In the long run no conscious will can ever
replace the life instinct. This instinct comes to us from within, as a
compulsion or will or command, and-if as has more or less been
done from time immemorial-we give it the name of a personal
daimon we are at least aptly expressing the psychological situation.
And if, by employing the concept of the archetype, we attempt to
define a little more closely the point at which the daimon grips us,
we have not abolished anything, only approached closer to the
source of life.

It is only natural that I as a psychiatrist (doctor of the soul) should
espouse such a view, for I am primarily interested in how I can help
my patients find their healthy base again. To do that, a great variety
of knowledge is needed, as I have learned. Medicine in general
has, after all, proceeded in like manner. It has not made its
advances through the discovery of some single trick of healing, thus
phenomenally simplifying its methods. On the contrary, it has
evolved into a science of enormous complexity not the least of the
reasons being that it has made borrowings from all possible fields.
Hence I am not concerned with proving anything to other
disciplines; I am merely attempting to put their knowledge to good
use in my own field. Naturally, it is incumbent upon me to report on
such applications and their consequences. For certain new things
come to light when one transfers the knowledge of one field to
another and applies it in practice. Had X-rays remained the
exclusive property of the physicist and not been applied in
medicine, we would know far less. Then again, if radiation therapy
has in some circumstances dangerous consequences, that is
interesting to the physician; but it is not necessarily of interest to the

physicist, who uses radiation in an altogether different manner and
for other purposes. Nor will he think that the physician has poached
upon his territory when the latter points out certain harmful or
salutary properties of the invisible rays.

If I, for example, apply historical or theological insights in
psychotherapy, they naturally appear in a different light and lead to
conclusions other than those to which they lead when restricted to
their proper fields, where they serve other purposes.

The fact, therefore, that a polarity underlies the dynamics of the
psyche means that the whole problem of opposites in its broadest
sense, with all its concomitant religious and philosophical aspects,
is drawn into the psychological discussion. These aspects lose the
autonomous character they have in their own field inevitably so,
since they are approached in terms of psychological questions; that
is, they are no longer viewed from the angle of religious or
philosophical truth, but are examined for their psychological validity
and significance. Leaving aside their claim to be independent
truths, the fact remains that regarded empirically which is to say,
scientifically they are primarily psychic phenomena. This fact seems
to me incontestable. That they claim a justification for themselves is
in keeping with the psychological approach, which does not brand
such a claim unjustified, but on the contrary treats it with special
consideration. Psychology has no room for judgments like "only
religious" or "only philosophical".despite the fact that we too often
hear the charge of something's being "only psychological"
especially from theologians.

All conceivable statements are made by the psyche. Among other
things, the psyche appears as a dynamic process which rests on a
foundation of antithesis, on a flow of energy between two poles. It is
a general rule of logic that "principles are not to be multiplied
beyond the necessary." Therefore, since interpretation in terms of

energy has proved a generally valid principle of explanation in the
natural sciences, we must limit ourselves to it in psychology also.
No firm facts are available which would recommend some other
view; moreover, the antithetical or polaristic nature of the psyche
and its contents is verified by psychological experience. [13]

Now if the dynamic conception of the psyche is correct, all
statements which seek to overstep the limits of the psyche's polarity
statements about a metaphysical reality, for example must be
paradoxical if they are to lay claim to any sort of validity.

The psyche cannot leap beyond itself. It cannot set up any absolute
truths, for its own polarity determines the relativity of its

13 Cf. "On Psychic Energy," in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
(CW8).

statements. Wherever the psyche does announce absolute truths
such as, for example, "God is motion," or "God is One" it
necessarily falls into one or the other of its own antitheses. For the
two statements might equally well be: "God is rest".or"God is All."
Through one-sidedness the psyche disintegrates and loses its
capacity for cognition. It becomes an unreflective (because
unreflectable) succession of psychic states, each of which fancies
itself its own justification because it does not, or does not yet, see
any other state.

In saying this we are not expressing a value judgment, but only
pointing out that the limit is very frequently overstepped. Indeed, this
is inevitable, for, as Heraclitus says, "Everything is flux".Thesis is
followed by antithesis, and between the two is generated a third
factor, a lysis which was not perceptible before. In this the psyche
once again merely demonstrates its antithetical nature and at no
point has really got outside itself.

In my effort to depict the limitations of the psyche I do not mean to
imply that only the psyche exists. It is merely that, so far as
perception and cognition are concerned, we cannot see beyond the
psyche. Science is tacitly convinced that a non- psychic,
transcendental object exists. But science also knows how difficult it
is to grasp the real nature of the object, especially when the organ
of perception fails or is lacking, and when the appropriate modes of
thought do not exist or have still to be created. In cases where
neither our sense organs nor their artificial aids can attest the
presence of a real object, the difficulties mount enormously, so that
one feels tempted to assert that there is simply no real object
present. I have never drawn this overhasty conclusion, for I have
never been inclined to think that our senses were capable of
perceiving all forms of being. I have, therefore, even hazarded the
postulate that the phenomenon of archetypal configurations which
are psychic events par excellence may be founded upon a psychoid
base, that is, upon an only partially psychic and possibly altogether
different form of being. For lack of empirical data I have neither
knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being, which are
commonly called spiritual. From the point of view of science, it is
immaterial what I may believe on that score, and I must accept my
ignorance. But insofar as the archetypes act upon me, they are real
and actual to me, even though I do not know what their real nature
is. This applies, of course, not only to the archetypes but to the
nature of the psyche in general. Whatever it may state about itself, it
will never get beyond itself. All comprehension and all that is
comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are
hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world. Nevertheless,
we have good reason to suppose that behind this veil there exists
the uncomprehended absolute object which affects and influences
us and to suppose it even, or particularly, in the case of psychic
phenomena about which no verifiable statements can be made.
Statements concerning possibility or impossibility are valid only in

specialized fields; outside those fields they are merely arrogant
presumptions.

Prohibited though it may be from an objective point of view to make
statements out of the blue that is, without sufficient reason there are
nevertheless some statements which apparently have to be made
without objective reasons. The justification here is a psychodynamic
one, of the sort usually termed subjective and regarded as a purely
personal matter. But that is to commit the mistake of failing to
distinguish whether the statement really proceeds only from an
isolated subject, and is prompted by exclusively personal motives,
or whether it occurs generally and springs from a collectively
present dynamic pattern. In that case it should not be classed as
subjective, but as psychologically objective, since an indefinite
number of individuals find themselves prompted by an inner
impulse to make an identical statement, or feel a certain view to be
a vital necessity. Since the archetype is not just an inactive form, but
a real force charged with a specific energy, it may very well be
regarded as the causa efficiens of such statements, and be
understood as the subject of them. In other words, it is not the
personal human being who is making the statement, but the
archetype speaking through him. If these statements are stifled or
disregarded, both medical experience and common knowledge
demonstrate that psychic troubles are in store. These will appear
either as neurotic symptoms or, in the case of persons who are
incapable of neurosis, as collective delusions.

Archetypal statements are based upon instinctive preconditions
and have nothing to do with reason; they are neither rationally
grounded nor can they be banished by rational arguments. They
have always been part of the world scene representations
collectives, as Levy-Bruhl rightly called them. Certainly the ego and
its will have a great part to play in life; but what the ego wills is
subject in the highest degree to the interference, in ways of which

the ego is usually unaware, of the autonomy and numinosity of
archetypal processes. Practical consideration of these processes
is the essence of religion, insofar as religion can be approached
from a psychological point of view.

At this point the fact forces itself on my attention that beside the
field of reflection there is another equally broad if not broader area
in which rational understanding and rational modes of
representation find scarcely anything they are able to grasp. This is
the realm of Eros. In classical times, when such things were
properly understood, Eros was considered a god whose divinity
transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be
comprehended nor represented in anyway. I might, as many before
me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon,
whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the
heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of
finding the language which might adequately express the
incalculable paradoxes of love, Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator
and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel that
Paul's words 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not love" might well be the first condition of all
cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself . Whatever the
learned interpretation may be of the sentence "God is love," the
words affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. In my
medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again
been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to
explain what it is. Like Job, I had to 'lay my hand on my mouth. I
have spoken once, and I will not answer" (Job 40:4 f .)

Here is the greatest and smallest, the remotest and nearest, the
highest and lowest, and we cannot discuss one side of it without
also discussing the other. No language is adequate to this paradox.
Whatever one can say, no words express the whole. To speak of
partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is
meaningful Love "bears all things" and "endures all things" (i Cor.
13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be
added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the
instruments of cosmogonic "love." I put the word in quotation marks
to indicate that I do not use it in its connotations of desiring,
preferring, favoring, wishing, and similar feelings, but as something
superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole. Being a
part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may
assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and
enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it.
Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. "Love
ceases not" whether he speaks with the "tongues of angels," or with
scientific exactitude traces the life of the cell down to its uttermost
source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names
at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-
deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his
arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per
ignotius that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his
subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same
time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.

Retrospect

WHEN PEOPLE SAY I am wise, or a sage, I cannot accept it. A
man once dipped a hatful of water from a stream. What did that
amount to? I am not that stream. I am at the stream, but I do nothing.
Other people are at the same stream, but most of them find they
have to do something with it. I do nothing. I never think that I am the
one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and
behold, admiring what nature can do.

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and
said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God.
Why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowadays
no one can stoop so low"

One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream.

The difference between most people and myself is that for me the
"dividing walls" are transparent. That is my peculiarity. Others find
these walls so opaque that they see nothing behind them and
therefore think nothing is there. To some extent I perceive the
processes going on in the background, and that gives me an inner
certainty. People who see nothing have no certainties and can draw
no conclusions or do not trust them even if they do. I do not know
what started me off perceiving the stream of life. Probably the
unconscious itself. Or perhaps my early dreams. They determined
my course from the beginning.

Knowledge of processes in the background early shaped my
relationship to the world. Basically, that relationship was the same
in my childhood as it is to this day. As a child I felt myself to be
alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things

which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do
not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people
about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that
seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which
others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences
of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was
working on the unconscious. If a man knows more than others, he
becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to
companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than
the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each
individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself
with others.

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It
fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has
never experienced that has missed something important. He must
sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious;
that things happen and can be experienced which remain
inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated.
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is
life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite
and ungraspable.

I have had much trouble getting along with my ideas. There was a
daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It
overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I
was in the grip of the daimon. I could never stop at anything once
attained. I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my
contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they
saw only a fool rushing ahead.

I have offended many people, for as soon as I saw that they did not
understand me, that was the end of the matter so far as I was
concerned. I had to move on. I had no patience with people aside

from my patients. I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on
me and left me no freedom of choice. Of course I did not always
obey it. How can anyone live without inconsistency?

For some people I was continually present and close to them so
long as they were related to my inner world; but then it might happen
that I was no longer with them, because there was nothing left which
would link me to them. I had to learn painfully that people continued
to exist even when they had nothing more to say to me. Many
excited in me a feeling of living humanity, but only when they
appeared within the magic circle of psychology; next moment, when
the spotlight cast its beam elsewhere, there was nothing to be
seen. I was able to become intensely interested in many people; but
as soon as I had seen through them, the magic was gone. In this
way I made many enemies. A creative person has little power over
his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.

"Shamefully

A power wrests away the heart from us,

For the Heavenly Ones each demand sacrifice;

But if it should be withheld

Never has that led to good?

says Holderlin.

This lack of freedom has been a great sorrow to me. Often I felt as if
I were on a battlefield, saying, "Now you have fallen, my good
comrade, but I must go on." For "shamefully a power wrests away
the heart from us." I am fond of you, indeed I love you, but I cannot
stay. There is something heart-rending about that. And I myself am
the victim; I cannot stay. But the daimon manages things so that one
comes through, and blessed inconsistency sees to it that in flagrant
contrast to my "disloyalty" I can keep faith in unsuspected measure.

Perhaps I might say: I need people to a higher degree than others,

and at the same time much less. When the daimon is at work, one
is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one
achieve moderation.

The daimon of creativity has ruthlessly had its way with me. The
ordinary undertakings I planned usually had the worst of it though
not always and not everywhere. By way of compensation, I think, I
am conservative to the bone. I fill my pipe from my grandfather's
tobacco jar and still keep his alpenstock, topped with a chamois
horn, which he brought back from Pontresina after having been one
of the first guests at that newly opened Kurort.

I am satisfied with the course my life has taken. It has been
bountiful, and has given me a great deal. How could I ever have
expected so much? Nothing but unexpected things kept happening
to me. Much might have been different if I myself had been different.
But it was as it had to be; for all came about because I am as I am.
Many things worked out as I planned them to, but that did not always
prove of benefit to me. But almost everything developed naturally
and by destiny. I regret many follies which sprang from my
obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal.
And so I am disappointed and not disappointed. I am disappointed
with people and disappointed with myself. I have learned amazing
things from people, and have accomplished more than I expected
of myself. I cannot form any final judgment because the
phenomenon of life and the phenomenon of man are too vast. The
older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into
or known about myself.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am
distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and
cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate
worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my
life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite

convictions not about anything, really. I know only that I was born
and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist
on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all
uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a
continuity in my mode of being.

The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the
same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the
other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of
temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant,
the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree
with each step in our development. But that is or seems to me not
the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true:
Life is or has meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious
hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.

When Lao-tzu says: "All are clear, I alone am clouded," he is
expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. Lao-tzu is the
example of a man with superior insight who has seen and
experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life
desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable
meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is
eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its
lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or a
great philosopher like Lao-tzu. This is old age, and a limitation. Yet
there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night,
and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself,
the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all
things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long
separated me from the world has become transferred into my own
inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity
with myself.

Appendix I

LETTERS FROM FREUD TO JUNG [1]

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
April 16, 1909

DEAR FRIEND,

... It is remarkable that on the same evening that I formally adopted
you as an eldest son, anointing you as my successor and crown
prince in partibus infidelium that then and there you should have
divested me of my paternal dignity, and that the divesting seems to
have given you as much pleasure as investing your person gave
me. Now I am afraid that I must fall back again into the role of father
toward you in giving you my views on poltergeist phenomena. I must
do this because these things are different from what you would like
to think.

I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a
powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to
make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room
there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy
Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that's
obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such
noises are very rare. At first I was inclined to ascribe some
meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were
here were never heard again after your departure. But since then it
has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my
thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special
problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge.) The
phenomenon was soon deprived of all significance for me by

something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe,
vanished along with the spell of your personal presence; once
again, for various inner reasons, it seems to me wholly

1 Reproduced with the land permission of Ernst Freud, London.

implausible that anything of the sort should occur. The furniture
stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and
godless before the poet after the passing of the gods of Greece.

I therefore don once more my horn-rimmed paternal spectacles and
warn my dear son to keep a cool head and rather not understand
something than make such great sacrifices for the sake of
understanding. I also shake my wise gray locks over the question of
psycho-synthesis and think: Well, that is how the young folks are;
they really enjoy things only when they need not drag us along with
them, where with our short breath and weary legs we cannot follow.

Now I shall exercise the privilege of my years to turn loquacious and
tell you about one more matter between heaven and earth which
cannot be understood. A few years ago I took it into my head that I
would die between the ages of 61 and 62, which at that time
seemed to leave me a decent period of grace. (Today that leaves
me only eight years still to go.) Shortly afterward I made a trip to
Greece with my brother, and it was absolutely uncanny to see how
the number 61, or 60 in conjunction with i and a, kept cropping up
on anything that had a number, especially on vehicles. I
conscientiously noted down these occasions. By the time we came
to Athens, I was feeling depressed. At our hotel we were assigned
rooms on the second floor, and I hoped I could breathe again at
least there could be no chance of No. 61 . However, it turned out that
my room was No. 31 (which, with fatalistic license, I regarded as
after all half of 61-62). This wilier and nimbler figure proved to be
even better at dogging me than the first.

From that day until very recently the number 31 remained faithful to
me, with a 2 all too readily associated with it. But since I also have
in my psychic system regions in which I am merely avid for
knowledge and not at all superstitious, I have attempted to analyze
this conviction. Here it is. My conviction began in 1899. Two events
coincided at that time. The first was my writing The Interpretation of
Dreams (which, you know, is dated ahead to 1900); the second, my
being assigned a new telephone number, which I have to this day:
14362. It is easy to establish the link between these two facts: in the
year 1899, when I wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, I was 43
years old. What should be more obvious than that the other figures
in my telephone number were intended to signify the end of my life,
hence, 61 or 62? Suddenly there appears a method in this
madness. The superstition that I would die between 61 and 62 turns
out to be equivalent to the conviction that with the book on dreams I
had completed my life work, needed to say no more, and could die
in peace. You will grant that after this analysis it no longer sounds
so non-sensical. Incidentally, the influence of Wilhelm Fliess plays a
part in this; the superstitition dates from the year of his attack on
me.

Here is another instance where you will find confirmation of the
specifically Jewish character of my mysticism. Apart from this, I only
want to say that adventures such as mine with the number 62 can
be explained by two things. The first is an enormously intensified
alertness on the part of the unconscious, so that one is led like
Faust to see a Helen in every woman. The second is the undeniable
"co-operation of chance," which plays the same role in the
formation of delusions as somatic co-operation in hysterical
symptoms or linguistic co-operation in puns.

I therefore look forward to hearing more about your investigations of
the spook-complex, my interest being the interest one has in a

lovely delusion which one does not share oneself.

With cordial regards to yourself,
your wife and children, Yours,

Freud.

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19

May 1

DEAR FRIEND,

... I know that your deepest inclinations are impelling you toward a
study of the occult, and do not doubt that you will return home with a
rich cargo. There is no stopping that, and it is always right for a
person to follow the biddings of his own impulses. The reputation
you have won with your Dementia [2] will stand against the charge
of "mystic" for quite a while. Only don't stay too long away from us in
those lush tropical colonies; it is necessary to govern at home....
With cordial greetings and the hope that you will write me again
after a shorter interval this time.

Your faithful

Freud.

2. See above, Chap. V, n. 4, p. 149.

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19

June 15, 1911

DEAR FRIEND,

... In matters of occultism I have become humble ever since the
great lesson I received from Ferenczi's experiences. [3] I promise
to believe everything that can be made to seem the least bit
reasonable. As you know, I do not do so gladly. But my hubris has
been shattered. I should like to have you and F. acting in
consonance when one of you is ready to take the perilous step of
publication, and I imagine that this would be quite compatible with
complete independence during the progress of the work....

Cordial regards to you and the beautiful house

from Your faithful

Freud

3. Cf. Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1953-57),
III, pp. 387 f.

Appendix II

LETTERS TO EMMA JUNG FROM AMERICA

(1909)

September 6, 1909, Monday

At Prof. Stanley Halts

Clark University, Worcester

.... So now we are safely arrived in Worcester! I have to tell you
about the trip. Last Saturday there was dreary weather in New York.
All three of us were afflicted with diarrhea and had pretty bad
stomach aches.... In spite of feeling physically miserable and in
spite of not eating anything, I went to the paleontological collection,
where all the old monsters, the Lord God's anxiety dreams of
Creation, are to be seen. The collection is absolutely unique for the
phylogenesis of Tertiary mammals. I cannot possibly tell you all I
saw there. Then I met Jones, who had just arrived from Europe.
Around half-past three we took the elevated and rode from 42nd
Street to the piers. There we boarded a fantastically huge structure
of a steamer that had some five white decks. We took cabins, and
our vessel set sail from the West River around the point of
Manhattan with all its tremendous skyscrapers, then up the East
River under the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, right through the
endless tangle of tugs, ferryboats, etc., and through the Sound
behind Long Island. It was damp and chilly, we had belly aches and
diarrhea and were suffering from hunger besides, so we crawled
into bed. Early on Sunday morning we were already on land in Fall
River City, where in the rain we took the train to Boston and
immediately went on to Worcester. While we were en route, the

weather cleared. The countryside was utterly charming, low hills, a
great deal of forest, swamp, small lakes, innumerable huge erratic
rocks, tiny villages with wooden houses, painted red, green, or gray,
with windows framed in white (Holland!), tucked away under large,
beautiful trees. By 11:30 we were in Worcester. We found the
Standish Hotel a very pleasant place to stay, and cheap also, "on
the American plan," as they say here that is, with board. At six in the
evening, after a well-deserved rest, we called on Stanley Hall. He is
a refined, distinguished old gentleman close on seventy who
received us with the kindest hospitality. He has a plump, jolly, good-
natured, and extremely ugly wife who, however, serves wonderful
food. She promptly took over Freud and me as her "boys" and plied
us with delicious nourishment and noble wine, so that we began
visibly to recover. We slept very well that night in the hotel, and this
morning we have moved over to the Halls'. The house is furnished in
an incredibly amusing fashion, everything roomy and comfortable.
There is a splendid studio filled with thousands of books, and boxes
of cigars everywhere. Two pitch-black Negroes in dinner jackets,
the extreme of grotesque solemnity, perform as servants. Carpets
everywhere, all the doors open, even the bathroom door and the
front door; people going in and out all over the place; all the
windows extend down to the floor. The house is surrounded by an
English lawn, no garden fence. Half the city (about a hundred and
eighty thousand inhabitants) stands in a regular forest of old trees
which shade all the streets. Most of the houses are smaller than
ours, charmingly surrounded by flowers and flowering shrubs,
overgrown with Virginia creeper and wisteria; everything well
tended, clean, cultivated, and exceedingly peaceful and congenial.
A wholly different America! This is what they call New England. The
city was founded as long ago as 1690, so it is very old. Much
prosperity. The university, richly endowed, is small but
distinguished, and has a real, though plain, elegance. This morning
was the opening session. Prof. X had first turn, with boring stuff. We

soon decamped and took a delightful walk through the outskirts of
the town, which is surrounded on all sides by small and minute
lakes and cool woods. We were ecstatic over the peaceful beauty
of the surroundings. It is refreshing and reviving after the life in New
York....

Clark University

Worcester, Massachusetts

Wednesday, September 8, 1909

... The people here are all exceedingly amiable and on a decent
cultural level. We are beautifully taken care of at the Halls' and daily
recovering from the exertions of New York. My stomach is almost
back to normal now; from time to time there is a little twitch, but
aside from that, my general health is excellent. Yesterday Freud
began the lectures and received great applause. We are gaining
ground here, and our following is growing slowly but surely. Today I
had a talk about psychoanalysis with two highly cultivated elderly
ladies who proved to be very well informed and free-thinking. I was
greatly surprised, since I had prepared myself for opposition.
Recently we had a large garden party with fifty people present, in
the course of which I surrounded myself with five ladies. I was even
able to make jokes in English though what English! Tomorrow
comes my first lecture; all my dread of it has vanished, since the
audience is harmless and merely eager to hear new things, which is
certainly what we can supply them with. It is said that we shall be
awarded honorary doctorates by the university next Saturday, with a
great deal of pomp and circumstance. In the evening there will be a
"formal reception." Today's letter has to be short, since the Halls
have invited some people for five o'clock to meet us. We have also
been interviewed by the Boston Evening Transcript. In fact we are
the men of the hour here. It is very good to be able to spread

oneself in this way once in a while. I can feel that my libido is
gulping it in with vast enjoyment...

Clark University

Worcester ', Mass.

September 24, 1909

... Last night there was a tremendous amount of ceremony and
fancy dress, with all sorts of red and black gowns and gold-tasseled
square caps. In a grand and festive assemblage I was appointed
Doctor of Laws honoris causa and Freud likewise. Now I may place
an L.L.D. after my name. Impressive, what?... Today Prof. M. drove
us by automobile out to lunch at a beautiful lake. The landscape
was utterly lovely. This evening there is one more "private
conference" in Hall's house on the "psychology of sex." Our time is
dreadfully crammed. The Americans are really masters at that; they
hardly leave one time to catch one's breath. Right now I am rather
worn out from all the fabulous things we have been through, and am
longing for the quiet of the mountains. My head is spinning. Last
night at the awarding of the doctorate I had to deliver an impromptu
talk before some three hundred persons.... Freud is in seventh
heaven, and I am glad with all my heart to see him so....

I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again,
where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of
that infinite peace and spaciousness. Here one is in an almost
constant whirlwind. But I have, thank God, completely regained my
capacity for enjoyment, so that I can look forward to everything with
zest. Now I am going to take everything that comes along by storm,
and then I shall settle down again, satiated...

Albany, N. Y.

September 18,

... Two more days before departure! Everything is taking place in a
whirl. Yesterday I stood upon a bare rocky peak nearly 5600 feet
high, in the midst of tremendous virgin forests, looking far out into
the blue infinities of America and shivering to the bone in the icy
wind, and today I am in the midst of the metropolitan bustle of
Albany, the capital of the State of New York! The hundred thousand
enormously deep impressions I am taking back with me from this
wonderland cannot be described with the pen. Everything is too big,
too immeasurable. Something that has gradually been dawning
upon me in the past few days is the recognition that here an ideal
po- tentiality of life has become reality. Men are as well off here as
the culture permits; women badly off. We have seen things here that
in- spire enthusiastic admiration, and things that make one ponder
social evolution deeply. As far as technological culture is
concerned, we lag miles behind Ajnerica. But all that is frightfully
costly and already carries the germ of the end in itself. I must tell you
a great, great deal. I shall never forget the experiences of this
journey. Now we are tired of America. Tomorrow morning we are off
to New York, and on September21 we sail!...

368

Appendix II

Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse
North German Lloyd

BREMEN

September 22, 1909

... Yesterday morning I shook the dust o America from my feet, with

a light heart and an aching head, for the Y/s plied us with won- derful
champagne.... As far as abstinence goes, I've arrived on very shaky
ground indeed, in point of principle, so that I am honorably
withdrawing from my various teetotal societies. I confess myself an
honest sinner and only hope that I can endure the sight of a glass of
wine without emotion an undrunk glass, of course. That is always
so; only the forbidden attracts. I think I must not forbid myself too
much....

Well, then, at ten o'clock yesterday morning we sailed, to our left the
towering whitish and reddish heaven-storming towers of New York
City, to our right the smoking chimneys, docks, etc., of Hoboken.
The morning was misty; New York soon disappeared, and before
long the big swells of the ocean began. At the fireship we dropped
the American pilot and then sailed on out "into the mournful waste-
land of the sea." It is, as always, of cosmic grandeur and simplicity,
compelling silence; for what has man to say here, especially at night
when the ocean is alone with the starry sky? One looks out silendy,
surrendering all self-importance, and many old sayings and images
scurry through the mind; a low voice says something about the age-
oldness and infinitude of the "far-swelling, murmurous sea," of "the
waves of the sea and of love," of Leukothea, the lovely goddess
who appears in the foam of the seething waves to travel-weary
Odysseus and gives him the pearly veil which saves him from
Poseidon's storm. The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the
soul within itself and sounds them over. The beauty and grandeur of
the sea consists in our being forced down into the fruitful
bottomlands of our own psyches, where we confront and re-create
ourselves in the animation of the "mournful wasteland of the sea."
Now we are still worn out from the "torment of these last days." We
brood over the past few months, and the unconscious has a lot of
work to do, putting in order all the things America has churned up
within us. ...

Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse

North German Lloyd

BREMEN

September 25, 1909

.... Yesterday there was a storm that lasted all day until nearly
midnight. Most of the day I stood up front, under the bridge, on a
protected and elevated spot, and admired the magnificent
spectacle as the mountainous waves rolled up and poured a
whirling cloud of foam over the ship. The ship began to roll fearfully,
and several times we were soaked by a salty shower. It turned cold,
and we went in for a cup of tea. Inside, however, the t>rain flowed
down the spinal canal and tried to come out again from under the
stomach. Conse- quently I retired to my bed, where I soon felt fine
again and later was able to consume a pleasant supper. Outside
from time to time a wave thundered against the ship. The objects in
my cabin had all come to life: the sofa cushion crawled about on the
floor in the semi- darkness; a recumbent shoe sat up, looked
around in astonishment, and then shuffled quietly off under the sofa;
a standing shoe turned wearily on its side and followed its mate.
Now the scene changed. I realized that the shoes had gone under
the sofa to fetch my bag and brief case. The whole company
paraded over to join the big trunk under the bed. One sleeve of my
shirt on the sofa waved longingly after them, and from inside the
chests and drawers came rumbles and rattles. Suddenly there was
a terrible crash under my floor, a rattling, clattering, and tinkling.
One of the kitchens is underneath me. There, at one blow, five
hundred plates had been awakened from their deathlike torpor and
with a single bold leap had put a sudden end to their dreary
existence as slaves. In all the cabins roundabout, unspeakable
groans betrayed the secrets of the menu. I slept like a top, and this

morning the wind is beginning to blow from another side..

Appendix III

LETTER TO EMMA JUNG

FROM NORTH AFRICA

(1920)

Grand Hotel Sousse

Sousse Monday, March 15, 1920

This Africa is incredible

... Unfortunately I cannot write coherently to you, for it is all too much.
Only sidelights. After cold, heavy weather at sea, a sparkling
morning in Algiers. Bright houses and streets, dark green clumps of
trees, tall palms' crowns rising among them. White burnooses, red
fezzes, and among these the yellow uniforms of the Tirailleurs
d'Afrique, the red of the Spahis, then the Botanical Gardens, an en-
chanted tropical forest, an Indian vision, holy acvatta trees with
gigantic aerial roots like monsters, fantastic dwellings of the gods,
enormous in extent, heavy, dark green foliage rustling in the sea
wind.

Then thirty hours by rail to Tunis. The Arab city is classical antiquity
and Moorish middle ages, Granada and the fairy tale of Baghdad.
You no longer think of yourself; you are dissolved in this potpourri
which cannot be evaluated, still less described: a Roman column
stands here as part of a wall; an old Jewess of unspeakable
ugliness goes by in white baggy breeches; a crier with a load of
burnooses pushes through the crowd, shouting in gutturals that
might have come straight from the canton of Zurich; a patch of deep

blue sky, a snow-white mosque dome; a shoemaker busily stitching
away at shoes in a small vaulted niche, with a hot, dazzling patch of
sunlight on the mat before him; blind musicians with a (hum and tiny
three-stringed lute; a beggar who consists of nothing but rags;
smoke from oil cakes, and swarms of flies; up above, on a white
minaret in the blissful ether, a muezzin sings the midday chant; be-
low, a cool, shady, colonnaded yard with horseshoe portal framed
in glazed tiles; on die wall a mangy cat lies in thesun;ia coming and
going of red, white, yellow, blue, brown mantles, white turbans, red
fezzes, uniforms, faces ranging from white and light yellow to deep
black; a shuffling of yellow and red slippers, a noiseless scurrying of
naked black feet, and so on and so on.

In the morning the great god rises and fills both horizons with his joy
and power, and all living things obey him. At night the moon is so
silvery and glows with such divine clarity that no one can doubt the
existence of Astarte.

Between Algiers and Tunis He 550 miles of African soil, towering
up to the noble and spreading shapes of the great Atlas range,
wide valleys and plateaus bursting with grapes and grain, dark
green forests of cork oak. Today Horus rose out of distant, pale
mountains over an unending green and brown plain, and from tie
desert there sprang up a mighty wind which blew out to the dark
blue sea. On rolling, gray-green hills yellow-brown remains of whole
Roman cities, small flocks of black goats grazing around them,
nearby a Bedouin camp with black tents, camels, and donkeys. The
train runs into a camel which cannot make up its mind to get off the
tracks; the beast is killed; there is a great running up, shrieking, and
gesticulating of white-clad figures; and always the sea, now deep
blue, now hurting the eyes with its glitter in the sunlight. Out of olive
groves and palms and hedges of giant cactus floating in the
flickering, sun-shot air rises a snow-white city with divinely white
domes and towers, gloriously spread out over a hill. Then comes

Sousse, with white walls and towers, the harbor below; beyond the
harbor wall the deep blue sea, and in the port lies the sailing ship
with two lateen sails which I once painted! ! ! !

You stumble over Roman remains; with my cane I dug a piece of
Roman pottery out of the ground.

This is all nothing but miserable stammering; I do not know what
Africa is really saying to me, but it speaks. Imagine a tremendous
sun, air clear as in the highest mountains, a sea bluer than any you
have ever seen, all colors of incredible power. In the markets you
can still buy the amphorae of antiquity things like that and the
moon!!!...

Appendix IV

RICHARD WILHELM

I first met Richard Wilhelm at Count Keyserling's during a meet- ing
of the "School of Wisdom" in Darmstadt That was in the early
twenties. In 1923 we invited him to Zurich and he spoke on the I
Ching I at the Psychology Club.

Even before meeting him I had been interested in Oriental philoso-
phy, and around 1920 had begun experimenting with the I Ching.
One summer in Bollingen I resolved to make an all-out attack on the
riddle of this book. Instead of traditional stalks of yarrow required by
the classical method, I cut myself a bunch of reeds. I would sit for
hours on the ground beneath the hundred-year-old pear tree, the I
Ching beside me, practicing the technique by referring the result-
ant oracles to one another in an interplay of questions and answers.
All sorts of undeniably remarkable results emerged meaningful con-
nections with my own thought processes which I could not explain to
myself.

The only subjective intervention in this experiment consists in the
experimenter's arbitrarily that is, without counting dividing up the
bundle of forty-nine stalks at a single swoop. He does not know how
many stalks are contained in each bundle, and yet the result
depends upon their numerical relationship. All other manipulations
proceed mechanically and leave no room for interference by the
will. If a psychic causal connection is present at all, it can only
consist in the chance division of the bundle (or, in the other method,
the chance fall of the coins).

During the whole of those summer holidays I was preoccupied with

the question: Are the I Chings answers meaningful or not? If

1 The I Ching, or Book of Changes: English trans, by Cary F. Baynes, from
the German version of R. Wilhelm (New York and London, 1950). The origins
of this ancient Chinese book of wisdom and oracles go back to the fourth
millennium B.C. they are, how does the connection between the psychic
and the physical sequence of events come about? Time and again I en-
countered amazing coincidences which seemed to suggest the idea of an
acausal parallelism (a synchronicity, as I later called it). So fascinated was I
by these experiments that I altogether forgot to take notes, which I afterward
greatly regretted. Later, howe\er, when I often used to carry out the
experiment with my patients, it became quite clear that a significant number
of answers did indeed hit the mark. I remember, for example, the case of a
young man with a strong mother complex. He wanted to marry, and had
made the ac- quaintance of a seemingly suitable girl. However, he felt
uncertain, fearing that under the influence of his complex he might once
more find himself in the power of an overwhelming mother. I conducted the
experiment with him. The text of his hexagram read: "The maiden is
powerful. One should not marry such a maiden".

In the mid-thirties I met the Chinese philosopher Hu Shih. I asked
him his opinion of the I Ching, and received the reply: "Oh, that's
nothing but an old collection of magic spells, without signifi- cance"
He had had no experience with it or so he said. Only once, he
remembered, had he come across it in practice. One day on a walk
with a friend, the friend had told him about his unhappy love affair.
They were just passing by a Taoist temple. As a joke, he had said
to his friend: "Here you can consult the oracle!" No sooner said than
done. They went into the temple together and asked the priest for
an I Ching oracle. But he had not the slightest faith in this nonsense.

I asked him whether the oracle had been correct. Whereupon he
replied reluctantly, "Oh yes, it was, of course . . ".Remembering the
well-known story of the "good friend" who does everything one does
not wish to do oneself, I cautiously asked him whether he had not
profited by this opportunity. "Yes," he replied, "as a joke I asked a

question too."

"And did the oracle give you a sensible answer?" I asked.

He hesitated. "Oh well, yes, if you wish to put it that way".The
subject obviously made him uncomfortable.

A few years after my first experiments with the reeds, the I Ching
was published with Wilhelm's commentary. I instantly obtained the
book, and found to my gratification that Wilhelm took much the
same view of the meaningful connections as I had. But he knew the
entire literature and could therefore fill in the gaps which had been
outside my competence. When Wilhelm came to Zurich, I had the
opportunity to discuss the matter with him at length, and we talked a
great deal about Chinese philosophy and religion. What he told me,
out of his wealth of knowledge of the Chinese mentality, clarified
some of the most difficult problems that the European unconscious
had posed for me. On the other hand, what I had to tell him about
the results of my investigations of the unconscious caused him no
little surprise; for he recognized in them things he had considered to
be the exclusive possession of the Chinese philosophical tradition.

As a young man Wilhelm had gone to China in the service of a
Christian mission, and there the mental world of the Orient had
opened its doors wide to him. Wilhelm was a truly religious spirit,
with an unclouded and farsighted view of things. He had the gift of
being able to listen without bias to the revelations of a foreign
mentality, and to accomplish that miracle of empathy which enabled
him to make the intellectual treasures of China accessible to
Europe. He was deeply influenced by Chinese culture, and once
said to me, "It is a great satisfaction to me that I never baptized a
single Chi- nese!" In spite of his Christian background, he could not
help recog- nizing the logic and clarity of Chinese thought.
"Influenced" is sot quite the word to describe its effect upon him; it

had overwhelmed and assimilated him. His Christian views
receded into the back- ground, but did not vanish entirely; they
formed a kind of mental reservation, a moral proviso that was later
to have fateful conse- quences.

In China he had the good fortune to meet a sage of the old school
whom the revolution had driven out of the interior. This sage, Lau
Nai Suan, introduced him to Chinese yoga philosophy and the psy-
chology of the I Ching. To the collaboration of these two men we
owe the edition of the I Ching with its excellent commentary. For the
first time this prof oundest work of the Orient was introduced to the
West in a living and comprehensible fashion. I consider this
publica-tion Wilhelm's most important work. Clear and
unmistakably Western as his mentality was, in his I Ching
commentary he manifested a de-gree of adaptation to Chinese
psychology which is altogether un- matched.

When the last page of the translation was finished and the first
printer's proofs were coming in, the old master Lau Nai Suan died.
It was as if his work were completed and he had delivered the last
message of the old, dying China to Europe. And Wilhelm had been
the perfect disciple, a fulfillment of the wish-dream of the sage.

Wilhelm, when 1 met him, seemed completely Chinese, in outward
manner as much as in his way of writing and speaking. The Oriental
point of view and ancient Chinese culture had penetrated him
through and through. Upon his arrival in Europe, he entered the
faculty of the China Institute in Frankfurt am Main. Both in his
teaching work and in his lectures to laymen, however, he seemed to
feel the pressure of the European spirit. Christian views and forms
of thought moved steadily into the foreground. I went to hear some
lectures of his and they turned out to be scarcely any different from
conventional sermons.

This reversion to the past seemed to me somewhat unreflective and
therefore dangerous. I saw it as a reassimilation to the West, and
felt that as a result of it Wilhelm must come into conflict with him-
self. Since it was, so I thought, a passive assimilation, that is to say,
a succumbing to the influence of the environment, there was the
danger of a relatively unconscious conflict, a clash between his
Western and Eastern psyche. If, as I assumed, the Christian attitude
had originally given way to the influence of China, the reverse might
well be tak- ing place now: the European element might be gaining
the upper hand over the Orient once again. If such a process takes
place with- out a strong, conscious attempt to come to terms with it,
the un- conscious conflict can seriously affect the physical state of
health.

After attending the lectures, I attempted to call his attention to the
danger threatening him. My words to him were: "My dear Wilhelm,
please do not take this amiss, but I have the feeling that the West is
taking possession of you again, and that you are becoming
unfaithful to your mission of transmitting the East to the West".

He replied, "I think you are right something here is overpowering
me. But what can be done?"

A few years later Wilhelm was staying as a guest in my house, and
came down with an attack of amoebic dysentery. It was a disease
he had had twenty years before. His condition grew worse during
the following months, and then I heard that Wilhelm was in the
hospital. I went to Frankfurt to visit him, and found a very sick man.
The doctors had not yet given up hope, and Wilhelm, too, spoke of
plans he wished to carry out when he got well. I shared his hopes,
but had my forebodings. What he confided to me at the time
confirmed my conjectures. In his dreams, he revisited the endless
stretches of deso- late Asiatic steppes the China he had left
behind. He was groping his way back to the problem which China

had set before him, the answer to which had been blocked for him
by the West. By now he was conscious of this question, but had
been unable to find a solution. His illness dragged on for months.

A few weeks before his death, when I had had no news from him for
a considerable time, I was awakened, just as I was on the point of
falling asleep, by a vision. At my bed stood a Chinese in a dark
blue gown, hands crossed in the sleeves. He bowed low before me,
as if he wished to give me a message. I knew what it signified. The
vision was extraordinarily vivid. Not only did I see every wrinkle in
the man's face, but every thread in the fabric of his gown.

Wilhelm's problem might also be regarded as a conflict between
consciousness and the unconscious, which in his case took the
form of a clash between West and East. I believed I understood his
situation, since I myself had the same problem as he and knew
what it meant to be involved in this conflict. It is true that even at our
last meeting Wilhelm did not speak plainly. Though he was intensely
interested when I introduced the psychological point of view, his
interest lasted only so long as my remarks concerned objective
matters such as meditation or questions posed by the psychology
of religion. So far, so good. But whenever I attempted to touch the
actual problem of his inner conflict, I immediately sensed a drawing
back, an in- ward shutting himself off because such matters went
straight to the bone. This is a phenomenon I have observed in many
men of im- portance. There is, as Goethe puts it in Faust, an
"untrodden, un- treadable" region whose precincts cannot and
should not be entered by force; a destiny which will brook no human
intervention.

Appendix V

Septem Sermones ad Mortuos

(1916)

Jung allowed Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to
the Dead) to be published privately as a booklet. He occasionally
gave copies to friends; it was never obtainable at bookstores. Later
he described it as a sin of his youth and regretted it.

The language is more or less in the style of the Red Book. But
compared with the endless conversations with inner figures in the
Red Book, the Seven Sermons form a self-contained whole. They
convey an impression, if only a fragmentary one, of what Jung went
through in the years 1913-1917, and of what he was bringing to
birth.

The Sermons contain hints or anticipations of ideas that were to
figure later in his scientific writings, more particularly concerning the
polaristic nature of the psyche, of life in general, and of all psycho-
logical statements. It was their thinking in paradoxes that drew Jung
to the Gnostics. That is why he identifies himself here with the
Gnostic writer Basilides (early second century A.D.) and even takes
over some of his terminology for example, God as Abraxas. It was a
deliberate game of mystification.

Jung consented to the publication of Seven Sermons in his Mem-
oirs only hesitantly and only "for the sake of honesty." He never
disclosed the key to the anagram at the end of the book.

The Seven Sermons to the Dead written by Basilides in Alexandria,
the City where the East toucheth the West

Sermo 1

The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what
they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word,
and thus I began my teaching.

Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as
fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both
empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as
for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing
that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both
thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no
qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the
pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him
as something distinct from the pleroma.

In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to
think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.

CRE ATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both
beginning and end of created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light
of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma
pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just
a s a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark
through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma
itself, for we are a part of the eternal and infinite. But we have no
share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed; not
spirit- ually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished
from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined
within time and space.

Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us.
Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and
entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it.
It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous.
Only figura- tively, therefore, do I speak of created being as a part
of the pleroma. Because, actually, the pleroma is nowhere divided,
since it is noth- ingness. We are also the whole pleroma, because,
figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point (assumed only, not
existing) in us and the boundless firmament about us. But
wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus
everything and nothing?

I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you
from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there
standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the
beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative.
That alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change.

What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore is it the one
thing which is fixed and certain; because it hath qualities: it is even
quality itself.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings
came to pass, not creatura; since created being is the very quality
of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death.
In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death.
The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctiveness is its es-
sence, and therefore it distinguished. Therefore man discriminateth
because his nature is distinctiveness. Wherefore also he
distinguish- eth qualities of the pleroma which are not. He
distinguished them out of his own nature. Therefore must he speak
of qualities of the pleroma which are not.

What use, say ye, to speak of it? Saidst thou not thyself, there is no
profit in thinking upon the pleroma?

That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able
to think about the pleroma. When we distinguish qualities of the
pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own
distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. But we
have said nothing concerning the pleroma. Concerning our own
distinctiveness, how- ever, it is needful to speak, whereby we may
distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If
we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves
enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities.

What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? If we do not
distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We
fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma.
We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are
given over to dissolution in the nothingness. This is the death of the
creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not
distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards
distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This
is called the PBINCIPIUM INDIVIDUAHONIS. This principle is the
essence of the creature. From this you can see why
indistinctiveness and non- distinction are a great danger for the
creature.

We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The
qualities are PAIBS OF OPPOSITES, such as

The Effective and the Ineffective.

Fullness and Emptiness.

Living and Dead.

Difference and Sameness.

Light and Darkness.

The Hot and the Cold.

Force and Matter.

Time and Space.

Good and Evil.

Beauty and Ugliness.

The One and the Many. etc.

The pairs of opposites are qualities of the pleroma which are not,
because each balanceth each. As we are the pleroma itself, we
also have all these qualities in us. Because the very ground of our
nature is distinctiveness, therefore we have these qualities in the
name and sign of distinctiveness, which meaneth

1. These qualities are distinct and separate in us one from the other;
therefore they are not balanced and void, but are effective. Thus are we the
victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.

2. The qualities belong to the pleroma, and only in the name and sign of
distinctiveness can and must we possess or li\e them. We must distinguish
ourselves from qualities. In the pleroma they are balanced and void; in us
not. Being distinguished from them delivereth us.

When we strive after the good or the beautiful, we thereby forget our
own nature, which is distinctiveness, and we are delivered over to
the qualities of the pleroma, which are pairs of opposites. We labor
to attain to the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also

lay hold of the evil and the ugly, since in the pleroma these are one
with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to
our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves
from the good and the beautiful, and, therefore, at the same time,
from the evil and the ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma,
namely, into nothingness and dissolution.

Thou sayest, ye object, that difference and sameness are also
qualities of the pleroma. How would it be, then, if we strive after
difference? Are we, in so doing, not true to our own nature? And
must we none the less be given over to sameness when we strive
after difference?

Ye must not forget that the pleroma hath no qualities. We create
them through thinking. If, therefore, ye strive after difference or
'sameness, or any qualities whatsoever, ye pursue thoughts which
flow to you out of the pleroma; thoughts, namely, concerning non-
existing qualities of the pleroma. Inasmuch as ye run after these
thoughts, ye fall again into the pleroma, and reach difference and
sameness at the same time. Not your thinking, but your being, is

distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, as ye think it, must ye
strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is
only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. If ye had
this striving ye would not need to know anything about the pleroma
and its qualities, and yet would ye come to your right goal by virtue
of your own being. Since, however, thought estrangeth from being,
that knowledge must I teach you wherewith ye may be able to hold
your thought in leash.

Sermo II

In the night the dead stood along the wall and cried:

We would have knowledge of god. Where is god? Is god dead?

God is not dead. Now, as ever, he liveth. God is creatura, for he is
something definite, and therefore distinct from the pleroma. God is
quality of the pleroma, and everything which I said of creatura also
is true concerning him.

He is distinguished, however, from created beings through this, that
he is more indefinite and indeterminable than they. He is less
distinct than created beings, since the ground of his being is
effective fullness. Only in so far as he is definite and distinct is he
creatura, and in like measure is he the manifestation of the effective
fullness of the pleroma.

Everything which we do not distinguish falleth into the pleroma and
is made void by its opposite. If, therefore, we do not distinguish
god, effective fullness is for us extinguished.

Moreover god is the pleroma itself, as likewise each smallest point
in the created and uncreated is the pleroma itself.

Effective void is the nature of the devil. God and devil are the first
manifestations of nothingness, which we call the pleroma. It is in-
different whether the pleroma is or is not, since in everything it is
balanced and void. Not so creatura. In so far as god and devil are
creatura they do not extinguish each other, but stand one against
the other as effective opposites. We need no proof of their
existence. It is enough that we must always be speaking of them.
Even if both were not, creatura, of its own essential distinctiveness,
would forever dis- tinguish them anew out of the pleroma.

Everything that discrimination taketh out of the pleroma is a pair of
opposites. To god, therefore, always belongeth the devil.

This inseparability is as close and, as your own life hath made you
see, as indissoluble as the pleroma itself. Thus it is that both stand
very close to the pleroma, in which all opposites are extinguished
and joined.

God and devil are distinguished by the qualities fullness and
emptiness, generation and destruction. EFFECTIVENESS is
common to both. Effectiveness joineth them. Effectiveness,
therefore, stahdeth above both; is a god above god, since in its
effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness.

This is a god whom ye knew not, for mankind forgot it. We name it
by its name ABF?AXAS. It is more indefinite still than god and devil.

That god may be distinguished from it, we name god HELIOS or
Sun. Abraxas is effect. Nothing standeth opposed to it but the
ineffec-tive; hence its effective nature freely unfoldeth itself. The
ineffective is not, therefore resisteth not. Abraxas standeth above
the sun and above the devil. It is improbable probability, unreal
reality. Had the pleroma a being, Abraxas would be its
manifestation. It is the effective itself, not any particular effect, but
effect in general.

It is unreal reality, because it hath no definite effect.

It is also creatura, because it is distinct from the pleroma.

The sun hath a definite effect, and so hath the devil. Wherefore do
they appear to us more effective than indefinite Abraxas.

It is force, duration, change.

The dead now raised a great tumult, for they were Christians.

Sermo III

Like mists arising from a marsh, the dead came near and cried:
Speak further unto us concerning the supreme god.

Hard to know is the deity of Abraxas. Its power is the greatest,
because man perceiveth it not. From the sun he draweth the sum-
mum bonum; from the devil the inftrnum mdlum; but from Abraxas
LIFE, altogether indefinite, the mother of good and evil.

Smaller and weaker life seemeth to be than the summum bonum;
wherefore is it also hard to conceive that Abraxas transcendeth
even the sun in power, who is himself the radiant source of all the
force of life.

Abraxas is the sun, and at the same time the eternally sucking
gorge of the void, the belittling and dismembering devil.

The power of Abraxas is twofold; but ye see it not, because for your
eyes the warring opposites of this power are extinguished,

What the god-sun speaketh is life.

What the devil speaketh is death.

But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is
life and death at the same time.

Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness,
in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas
terrible.

It is splendid as the lion in the instant he striketh down his victim. It
is beautiful as a day of spring. It is the great Pan himself and also
the small one. It is Priapos.

It is the monster of the under-worid,

a thousand-armed polyp,

coiled knot of winged serpents, frenzy.

It is the hermaphrodite of the earliest beginning.

It is the lord of the toads and frogs,

which li\e in the water and go

up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth

at noon and at midnight.

It is abundance that seeketh union with emptiness.

It is holy begetting.

It is lo\e and love's murder.

It is the saint and his betrayer.

It is the brightest light of day and

the darkest night of madness.

To look upon it, is blindness.

To know it, is sickness.

To worship it, is death.

To fear it, is wisdom.

To resist it not, is redemption.

God dwelleth behind the sun, the devil behind the night What god
bringeth forth out of the light the devil sucketji into the night. But
Abraxas is the world, its becoming and its passing. Upon every gift
that cometh from the god-sun the devil layeth his curse.

Everything that ye entreat from the god-sun begetteth a deed of the
devil.

Everything that ye create with the god-sun giveth effective power to
the devil.

That is terrible Abraxas.

It is the mightiest creature, and in it the creature is afraid of itself. It
is the manifest opposition of creatura to the pleroma and its
nothingness.

It is the son's horror of the mother.
It is the mother's love for the son.

It is the delight of the earth and

the cruelty of the heavens.

Before its countenance man becometh like stone.

Before it there is no question and no reply.

It is the life of creatura.

It is the operation of distinctiveness.

It is the love of man.

It is the speech of man.

It is the appearance and the shadow of man.

It is illusory reality.

Now the dead howled and raged, for they were unperfected.

Sermo IV

The dead filled the place murmuring and said:

Tell us of gods and devils, accursed onel

The god-sun is the highest good; the devil is the opposite. Thus
have ye two gods. But there are many high and good things and
many great evils. Among these are two god-devils; the one is the
BURNING ONE, the other the GROWING ONE.

The burning one is EROS, who hath the form of flame. Flame giveth
light because it consumeth.

The growing one is the TREE OF LIFE. It buddeth, as in growing it
heapeth up living stuff.

Eros flameth up and dieth. But the tree of life groweth with slow and
constant increase through unmeasured time.

Good and evil are united in the flame.

Good and evil are united in the increase of the tree. In their divinity
stand life and love opposed.

Innumerable as the host of the stars is the number of gods and
devils.

Each star is a god, and each space that a star filleth is a devil. But
the empty-fullness of the whole is the pleroma.

The operation of the whole is Abraxas, to whom only the ineffec-
tive standeth opposed.

Four is the number of the principal gods, as four is the number of
the world's measurements.

One is the beginning, the god-sun.

Two is Eros; for he bindeth twain together and outspreadeth himself
in brightness.

Three is the Tree of Life, for it filleth space with bodily forms.

Four is the devil, for he openeth all that is closed. All that is formed
of bodily nature doth he dissolve; he is the destroyer in whom
everything is brought to nothing.

For me, to whom knowledge hath been given of the multiplicity and
diversity of the gods, it is well. But woe unto you, who replace these
incompatible many by a single god. For in so doing ye beget the
torment which is bred from not understanding, and ye mutilate the
creature whose nature and aim is distinctiveness. How can ye be
true to your own nature when ye try to change the many into one?
What ye do unto the gods is done likewise unto you. Ye all become

equal and thus is your nature maimed.

Equality shall prevail not for god, but only for the sake of man. For
the gods are many, whilst men are few. The gods are mighty and
can endure their manifoldness. For like the stars they abide in
solitude, parted one from the other by immense distances. But men
are weak and cannot endure their manifold nature. Therefore they
dwell together and need communion, that they may bear their sepa-
rateness. For redemption's sake I teach you the rejected truth, for
the sake of which I was rejected.

The multiplicity of the gods corresponded! to the multiplicity of man.

Numberless gods await the human state. Numberless gods have
been men. Man shareth in the nature of the gods. He cometh from
the gods and goeth unto god.

Thus, just as it serveth not to reflect upon the pleroma, it availeth not
to worship the multiplicity of the gods. Least of all availeth it to
worship the first god, the effective abundance and the summum
bonum. By our prayer we can add to it nothing, and from it nothing
take; because the effective void swalloweth all.

The bright gods form the celestial world. It is manifold and infi- nitely
spreading and increasing. The god-sun is the supreme lord of that
world.

The dark gods form the earth-world. They are simple and infinitely
diminishing and declining. The devil is the earth-world's lowest lord,
the moon-spirit, satellite of the earth, smaller, colder, and more
dead than the earth.

There is no difference between the might of the celestial gods and
those of the earth. The celestial gods magnify, the earth-gods

dimin- ish. Measureless is the movement of both.

Sermo V

The dead mocked and cried: Teach us, fool, of the church and holy
communion.

The world of the gods is made manifest in spirituality and in
sexuality. The celestial ones appear in spirituality, the earthly in
sexuality.

Spirituality conceiveth and embraceth. It is womanlike and therefore
we call it MATER COELESTIS, the celestial mother. Sexuality
engendereth and createth. It is manlike, and therefore we call it
PHAIJLOS, the earthly father.

The sexuality of man is more of the earth, the sexuality of woman is
more of the, spirit.

The spirituality of man is more of heaven, it goeth to tie greater.

The spirituality of woman is more of tie earth, it goeth to the smaller.

Lying and devilish is the spirituality of the man which goeth to the
smaller.

Lying and devilish is the spirituality of the woman which goeth to the
greater.

Each must go to its own place.

Man and woman become devils one to the other when they divide
not their spiritual ways, for the nature of creatura is distinctiveness.

The sexuality of man hath an earthward course, the sexuality of

woman a spiritual. Man and woman become devils one to the other
if they distinguish not their sexuality.

Man shall know of the smaller, woman the greater.

Man shall distinguish himself both from spirituality and from
sexuality. He shall call spirituality Mother, and set her between
heaven and earth. He shall call sexuality Phallos, and set him be-
tween himself and earth. For the Mother and the Phallos are super-
human daemons which reveal the world of the gods. They are for us
more effective than the gods, because they are closely akin to our
own nature. Should ye not distinguish yourselves from sexuality and
from spirituality, and not regard them as of a nature both above you
and beyond, then are ye delivered over to them as qualities of the
pleroma. Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things
which ye possess and contain. But they possess and contain you;
for they are powerful daemons, manifestations of the gods, and are,
therefore, things which reach beyond you, existing in themselves.
No man hath a spirituality unto himself, or a sexuality unto himself.
But he standeth under the law of spirituality and of sexuality.

No man, therefore, escapeth these daemons. Ye shall look upon
them as daemons, and as a common task and danger, a common
burden which life hath laid upon you. Thus is life for you also a
common task and danger, as are the gods, and first of all terrible
Abraxas.

Man is weak, therefore is communion indispensable. If your com-
munion be not under the sign of the Mother, then is it under the sign
of the Phallos. No communion is suffering and sickness.
Communion in everything is dismemberment and dissolution.

Distinctiveness leadeth to singleness. Singleness is opposed to
com- munion. But because of man's weakness over against the

gods and daemons and their invincible law is communion needful.
Therefore shall there be as much communion as is needful, not for
man's sake, but because of the gods. The gods force you to
communion. As much as they force you, so much is communion
needed, more is evil.

In communion let every man submit to others, that communion be
maintained; for ye need it.

In singleness the one man shall be superior to the others, that every
man may come to himself and avoid slavery.

In communion there shall be continence.

In singleness there shall be prodigality.

Communion is depth.

Singleness is height.

Right measure in communion purifieth and preserveth.

Right measure in singleness purifieth and increaseth.

Communion giveth us warmth, singleness giveth us light.

Sermo VI

The daemon of sexuality approacheth our soul as a serpent. It is
half human and appeareth as thought-desire.

The daemon of spirituality descendeth into our soul as the white
bird. It is half human and appeareth as desire-thought.

The serpent is an earthy soul, half daemonic, a spirit, and akin to

the spirits of the dead. Thus too, like these, she swarmeth around in
the things of earth, making us either to fear them or pricking us with
intemperate desires. The serpent hath a nature like unto woman.
She seeketh ever the company of the dead who are held by the
spell of the earth, they who found not the way beyond that leadeth to
singleness. The serpent is a whore. She wantoneth with the devil
and with evil spirits; a mischievous tyrant and tormentor, ever
seducing to evilest company. The white bird is a half-celestial soul
of man. He bideth with the Mother, from time to time descending-
The bird hatha nature like unto man, and is effective thought. He is
chaste and solitary, a messenger of the Mother. He flieth high
above earth. Hecommandeth singleness. He bringeth knowledge
from the distant ones who went before and are perfected. He
beareth our word above to the Mother. She intercedeth, she
warneth, but against the gods she hath no power. She is a vessel of
the sun. The serpent goeth below and with her cunning she lameth
the phallic daemon, or else goadeth him on. She yieldeth up the too
crafty thoughts of the earthy one, those thoughts which creep
through every hole and cleave to all things with desirousness. The
serpent, doubtless, willeth it not, yet she must be of use to us. She
fleeth our grasp, thus showing us the way, which with our human
wits we could not find.

With disdainful glance the dead spake: Cease this talk of gods and
daemons and souls. At bottom this hath long been known to us.

Sermo VII

Yet when night was come the dead again approached with lamen-
table mien and said: There is yet one matter we forgot to mention.
Teach us about man.

Man is a gateway, through which from the outer world of gods,
daemons, and souls ye pass into the inner world; out of the greater

into the smaller world. Small and transitory is man. Already is he
behind you, and once again ye find yourselves in endless space, in
the smaller or innermost infinity. At immeasurable distance standeth
one single Star in the zenith.

This is the one god of this one man. This is his world, his pleroma,
his divinity.

In this world is man Abraxas, the creator and the destroyer of his
own world.

This Star is the god and the goal of man.

This is his one guiding god. In him goeth man to his rest. Toward
him goeth the long journey of the soul after death. In him shineth
forth as light all that man bringeth back from the greater world. To
this one god man shall pray.

Prayer increaseth the light of the Star. It casteth a bridge over
death. It prepareth life for the smaller world and assuageth the
hopeless desires of the greater.

When the greater world waxeth cold, burneth the Star.

Between man and his one god there standeth nothing, so long as
man can turn away his eyes from the flaming spectacle of Abraxas.

Man here, god there.

Weakness and nothingness here, there eternally creative power.

Here nothing but darkness and chilling moisture.

There wholly sun.

Whereupon the dead were silent and ascended like the smoke
above

the herdsman's fire, who through the night kept watch over his flock.

ANAGRAMMA:

NAHTRIHECCUNDE

GAHINNEVERAHTUNIN

ZEHGESSURKLACH

ZUNNUS.

(Translated by H. G. Baynes)

Glossary

Amplification. Elaboration and clarification of a dream-image by
means of directed association (q.v.) and of parallels from the
human sciences (symbology, mythology, mysticism, folklore, history
of reli- gion, ethnology, etc.).

Anima and Animus. Personification of the feminine nature of a
man's unconscious and the masculine nature of a woman's. This
psychologi- cal bisexuality is a reflection of the biological fact that it
is the larger number of male (or female) genes which is the decisive
factor in the determination of sex. The smaller number of
contrasexual genes seems to produce a corresponding
contrasexual character, which usually re- mains unconscious.
Anima and animus manifest themselves most typically in
personified form as figures in dreams and fantasies ("dream girl,"
"dream lover"), or in the irrationalities of a man's feeling and a
woman's thinking. As regulators of behavior they are two of the
most influential archetypes ( q.v. ) .

C. G. JUNG: "Every man carries within him the eternal image of
woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a defini-
tive feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, an
hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic
system of the man, an imprint or 'archetype' [q.v] of all the ancestral
experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the
impressions ever made by woman... Since this image is
unconscious, it is al- ways unconsciously projected upon the person
of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate
attraction or aversion."

(The Development of Personality, GW 17, p. 198)

"In its primary 'unconscious' form the animus is a compound of
spontaneous, unpremeditated opinions which exercise a powerful
in-fluence on the woman's emotional life, while the anima is
similarly compounded of feelings which thereafter influence or
distort the man's understanding ('she has turned his head').
Consequently the animus likes to project itself upon 'intellectuals'
and aH kinds of*heroes,* including tenors, artists, sporting
celebrities, etc. The anima has a predilection for everything that is
unconscious, dark, equivocal, and unrelated in woman, and also for
her vanity, frigidity, helpless- ness, and so forth."

(The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16, par. 521)

"... no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without
becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough
sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would
be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied
truisms, cliches from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled
platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and
brain-splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its
participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all
languages of the world and always remains essentially the same."
(Aion, CW9, u, p. 15)

Tie natural function of the animus ( as well as of the*anima ) is to
remain in [their] place between individual consciousness and the
collective unconscious [q.v.j; exactly as the persona [q.v.j is a sort of
stratum between the ego-consciousness and die objects of the
external world. The animus and the anima should function as a
bridge, or a door, leading to the images of the collective
unconscious, as the persona should be a sort of bridge into the
world."

(Unpublished Seminar Notes. "Visions" I, p. 116)

Archetype, C. G. JUNG: "The concept of the archetype ... is derived
from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and
fairy-tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up
every- where. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams,
deliria.and delusions of individuals living today. These typical
images and associations are what I call archetypal ideas. The more
vivid they are, the more they will be coloured by particularly strong
feeling- tones... They impress, influence, and fascinate us. They
have their origin in the archetype, which in itself is an
irrepresentable, uncon- scious, pre-existent form that seems to be
part of the inherited struc-ture of the psyche and can therefore
manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time. Because of its
instinctual nature, the arche-type underlies the feeling-toned
complexes [q.v.] and shiares their autonomy." (Civilization in
Transition, CW 10, par. 847)

"Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype
is determined in regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind
of unconscious idea (if such an expression be admissible). It is
neces-sary to point out once more that archetypes are not
determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form
and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image [9.1?.] is
determined as to its content only when it has "become conscious
and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience.
Its form, however, ... might perhaps be compared to the axial
system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline
structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence
of its own. This first ap- pears according to the specific way in
which the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is
empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a
possibility of representation which is given a priori. The
representations themselves are not inherited, only file forms, and in
that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are

also determined in form only. The existence of the instincts can no
more be proved than the existence of the arche- types, so long as
they do not manifest themselves concretely." ( The Archetypes and
the Collective Unconscious, CW 9, i, pp. 79 f.)"... it seems to me
probable that the real nature of the archetype is not capable of
being made conscious, that it is transcendent, on which account I
call it psychoid [qr.t?.].*

( The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, p. 213)

Association. The linking of ideas, perceptions, etc. according to
simi-larity, coexistence, opposition, and causal dependence. Free
associa-tion in Freudian dream interpretation: spontaneous ideas
occurring to the dreamer, which need not necessarily refer to the
dream situa-tion. Directed or controlled association in Jungian
dream interpreta-tion: spontaneous ideas which proceed from a
given dream situation and constantly relate to it.

Association test Methods for discovering complexes (9.1?.) by
meas- uring the reaction time and interpreting the answers to given
stimulus words. Complex-indicators: prolonged reaction time,
faults, or the idiosyncratic quality of the answers when the stimulus
words touch on complexes which the subject wishes to hide or of
which he is not conscious.

Complex, C. G. JUNG: "Complexes are psychic fragments which
have split off owing to traumatic influences or certain incompatible
tenden-cies. As the association experiments prove, complexes
interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious
performance; they produce disturbances of memory and blockages
in the flow of associa- tions [qr.tx]; they appear and disappear
according to their own laws; they can temporarily obsess
consciousness, or influence speech and action in an unconscious
way. In a word, complexes behave like inde- pendent beings, a fact

especially evident in abnormal states of mind. In the voices heard
by the insane they even take on a personal ego- character like that
of the spirits who manifest themselves through automatic writing
and similar techniques."

( The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, p. 121 )

Consciousness, C. G. JUNG: "When one reflects upon what
conscious- ness really is, one is profoundly impressed by the
extreme wonder of the fact that an event which takes place outside
in the cosmos simul-taneously produces an internal image, that it
takes place, so to speak, inside as well, which is to say: becomes
conscious."

(Basel Seminar, privately printed, 1934, p. i) "For indeed our
consciousness does not create itself it wells up from unknown
depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it
wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an
unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the
primordial womb of the unconscious."

(Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 1 1 , pp. 569 f . )

Dream, C. G JUNG: "The dream is a little hidden door in the
innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into
that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-
consciousness, and which wiH remain psyche no matter how far our
ego-consciousness may extend... All consciousness separates; but
in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more
eternal man dwell- ing in the darkness of primordial night. There he
is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from
nature and bare of all egohood. Out of these aU-uniting depths
arises the dream, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral."

(Civilteation in Transition, CW 10, pars. 304 f.)

Extraversion. Attitude-type characterized by concentration of
interest on the external object. See Introversion.

God-image. A term derived from the Church Fathers, according to
whom the imago Dei is imprinted on the human soul. When such an
image is spontaneously produced in dreams, fantasies, visions,
etc. it is, from the psychological point of view, a symbol of the self (
q.v. ), of psychic wholeness.

C. G. JUNG: "It is only through the psyche that we can establish that
God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these
actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell
whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both
are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. But
empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of
probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of
wholeness which manifests it- self spontaneously in dreams, etc.,
and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other
archetypes to fids centre. Conse- quently it does not seem
improbable that the archetype produces a symbolism which has
always characterized and expressed the Deity... The God-image
does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special
content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype
from which we can no longer distinguish the God- image
empirically."

( Psychology and Religion; West and East, CW 1 1 , pp. 468 )

"One can, then, explain the God-image ... as a reflection of the self,
or, conversely, explain the self as an imago Dei in man."

Hierosgamos. Sacred or spiritual marriage, union of archetypal

figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity and also in alchemy.
Typical examples are the representation of Christ and the Church
as bride- groom and bride (sponsus et sponsa) and the alchemical
conjunction of sun and moon.

Individuation. C. G. JUNG: "I use the term 'individuation* to denote
the process by which a person becomes a psychological 'in-
dividual/ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole.*"

( The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9, i, p. 275)

Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and,
in so far as 'individuality 1 embraces our innermost, last, and incom-
parable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self. We
could therefore translate individuation as 'coming to selfhood' or
'self-reali- zation/ " ( Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7,
par. 266)

"But again and again I note that the individuation process is con-
fused with the coming of the ego into consciousness and that the
ego is in consequence identified with the self, which naturally
produces a hopeless conceptual muddle. Individuation is then
nothing but ego- centredness and autoeroticism. But the self
comprises infinitely more than a mere ego ... It is as much one's
self, and all other selves, as the ego. Individuation does not shut
one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself."

{ The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, p. 226 )

Inflation. Expansion of the personality beyond its proper limits by
identification with the persona or with an archetype, or in
pathological cases with a historical or religious figure. It produces
an exaggerated sense of one's self-importance and is usually
compen- sated by feelings of inferiority.

Introversion. Attitude-type characterized by orientation in Me
through subjective psychic contents. See Extraversion.

Mana. Melanesian word for extraordinarily effective power emanat-
ing from a human being, object, action, or event, or from
supernatural beings and spirits. Also health, prestige, power to
work magic and to heal. A primitive concept of psychic energy.

Mandala (Sanskrit). Magic circle. In Jung, symbol of the center, the
goal, or the self (q.t?.) as psychic totality; self -representation of a
psychic process of centering; production of a new center of person-
ality. This is symbolically represented by the circle, the square, or
the quaternity (q-v), by symmetrical arrangements of the number
four and its multiples. In Lamism and Tantric Yoga the mandala is
an instrument of contemplation (yantra), seat and birthplace of the
gods. Disturbed mandala: Any form that deviates from the circle >
square, or equal-armed cross, or whose basic number is not four or
its multiples.

C. G. JUNG: "Mandala means a circle, more especially a magic
circle, and this form of symbol is not only to be found all through the
East, but also among us; mandalas are amply represented in the
Middle Ages. The specifically Christian ones come from the earlier
Middle Ages. Most of them show Christ in the centre, with the four
evange- lists, or their symbols, at the cardinal points. This
conception must be a very ancient one because Horus was
represented with his four sons in the same way by the Egyptians...
For the most part, the man- dala form is that of a flower, cross, or
wheel, with a distinct tendency toward four as the basis of the
structure."

(Commentary to Secret of the Golden Flower, CW 13, par. 31,
mod. )

"Mandates... usually appear in situations of psychic confusion and
perplexity. The archetype thereby constellated represents a pat-
tern of order which, like a psychological View-finder' marked with a
cross or circle divided into four, is superimposed on the psychic
chaos so that each content falls into place and the weltering con-
fusion is held together by the protective circle ... At the same time
they are yantras, instruments with whose help the order is brought
into being." ( Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par. 803 )

Numinosum. Rudolf Otto's term (in his Idea of the Holy) for the in-
expressible, mysterious, terrifying, directly experienced and pertain-
ing only to the divinity.

Persona. Originally, the mask worn by an actor.

C. G. JUNG: "The persona ... is the individual's system of adapta-
tion to, or the manner he assumes in dealing with, the world. Every
calling or profession, for example, has its own characteristic
persona. ... Only, the danger is that [people] become identical with
their personas the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his
voice. ... One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona
is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others
think one is."

( The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9, i, pp. 122
f.)"

Primordial image. (Jakob Burckhardt) Term originally used by Jung
for archetype (q.v.).

Psychoid. "Soul-like" or "quasi-psychic."

C. G. JUNG: *... the collective unconscious... represents a psyche
that... cannot be directly perceived or 'represented/ in contrast to

the perceptible psychic phenomena, and on account of its
'irrepresentable* nature I have called it 'psychoid.* *

( The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, p. 436)

Quaternity C. G. JUNG: "The quaternity is an archetype of almost
uni-versal occurrence. It forms the logical basis for any whole
judgment. If one wishes to pass such a judgment, it must have this
fourfold aspect. For instance, if you want to describe the horizon as
a whole, you name the four quarters of heaven.... There are always
four elements, four prime qualities, four colours, four castes, four
ways of spiritual development, etc. So, too, there are four aspects
of psycho- logical orientation ... In order to orient ourselves, we must
have a function which ascertains that something is there
(sensation); a sec-ond function which established what is is
(thinking); a third function which states whether it suits us or not,
whether we wish to accept it or not (feeling), and a fourth function
which indicates where it came from and where it is going (intuition).
When this has been done, there is nothing more to say... The ideal
of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal
division is a quaternity."

(Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, p. 167) A
quaternity or quaternion often has a 3 + i structure, in that one of the
terms composing it occupies an exceptional position or has a
nature unlike that of the others. (For instance three of the symbols of
the Evangelists are animals and that of the fourth, of St. Luke, is an
angel.) This is the "Fourth" which, added to the other three, makes
them "One," symbolizing totality. In analytical psychology often the
"inferior" function (i.e., that function which is not at the conscious
disposal of the subject) represents the "Fourth," and its integration
into consciousness is one of the major tasks of the process of indi-
viduation

Self. The central archetype (. ); the archetype of order; the totality of
the personality. Symbolized by circle, square, quaternity (9.1?.),
child, mandala ( q.v. ) , etc.

C. G. JUNG: "... the self is a quantity that is supraordinate to the
conscious ego. It embraces not only the conscious but also the un-
conscious psyche, and is therefore, so to speak, a personality
which we also are.... There is little hope of our ever being able to
reach even approximate consciousness of the self, since however
much we may make conscious there will always exist an
indeterminate and in- determinable amount of unconscious material
which belongs to the totality of the self."

(Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par. 274)

"The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference
which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of
this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness."

(Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 44)

"... the self is our lif e's goal, for it is the completest expression of
that fateful combination we call individuality..."

( Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par. 404)

Shadow. The inferior part of the personality; sum of all personal and
collective psychic elements which, because of their incompatibility
with the chosen conscious attitude, are denied expression in life
and therefore coalesce into a relatively autonomous "splinter
personality" with contrary tendencies in the unconscious. The
shadow behaves compensatorily to consciousness; hence its
effects can be positive as well as negative. In dreams, the shadow
figure is always of the same sex as the dreamer.

C. G. JUNG: "The shadow personifies everything that the subject
re-fuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting
itself upon him directly or indirectly for instance, inferior traits of
charac-ter and other incompatible tendencies." ( The Archetypes
and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9, i, pp. 284 f . )

"... the shadow [is] that hidden, repressed, for the most part in-
ferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach
back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the
whole historical aspect of the unconscious. ... If it has been be-
lieved hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it
can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the
unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of
morally reprehensi- ble tendencies, but also displays a number of
good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions,
realistic insights, creative impulses, etc." ( Aton, CW 9, u, p. 266 )

Soul. C. G. JUNG: If the human [soul] is anything, it must be of un-
imaginable complexity and diversity, so that it cannot possibly be
approached through a mere psychology of instinct. I can only gaze
with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic
nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of
images which have accumulated over millions of years of living
development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness
is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the
psychic non-ego that fills them with nonspatial images. And these
images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic
factors.... Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of
the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe
within is the universe without; and just as I reach this .world through
the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of
the psyche."

( Freud and Psychoanalysis, CW 4, pp. 331 f . )

*lt would be blasphemy to assert that God can manifest Himself

everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of

the relationship between Cod and the soul automatically precludes

any devaluation of the latter. It would be going perhaps too far to
speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself
the faculty of relation to God, i.e. a correspondence, otherwise a
con- nection could never come about This correspondence is, in
psycho- logical terms, the archetype of the God-image [q.v.]"

(Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 11)

Synchronicity. A term coined by Jung to designate the meaningful
coincidence or equivalence (a) of a psychic and a physical state or
event which have no causal relationship to one another. Such syn-
chronistic phenomena occur, for instance, when an inwardly per-
ceived event (dream, vision, premonition, etc.) is seen to have a
correspondence in external reality: the inner image of premonition
has "come true"; (fc) of similar or identical thoughts, dreams, etc.
oc- curring at the same time in different places. Neither the one nor
the other coincidence can be explained by causality, but seems to
be con- nected primarily with activated archetypal processes in the
uncon- scious.

C. G. JUNG: "My preoccupation with the psychology of unconscious
processes long ago compelled me to look about for another
principle of explanation, because the causality principle seemed to
me in- adequate to explain certain remarkable phenomena of the
psychology of the unconscious. Thus I found that there are psychic
parallelisms which cannot be related to each other causally, but
which must be connected through another principle, namely the

contingency of events. This connection of events seemed to me
essentially given by the fact of their relative simultaneity, hence the
term 'synchronistic/ It seems, indeed, as though time, far from being
an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities or
basic conditions that manifest themselves simultaneously in
different places through paral- lelisms that cannot be explained
causally, as, for example, in cases of the simultaneous occurrence
of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic states." ("Richard
Wilhelm: InMemoriam," CW 15, par. 81, mod.)

"I chose this term because the simultaneous occurrence of two
meaningfully but not causally connected events seemed to me an
essential criterion. I am therefore using the general concept of syn-
chronicity in the special sense of a coincidence in time of two or
more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar
meaning, in contrast to 'synchronism/ which simply means the
simultaneous oc- currence of two events."

( The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, p. 441 )

"Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discon-
tinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign
power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it
appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever occur.
. . , Meaningful coincidences are thinkable as pure chance. But the
more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspond-
ence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability in-
creases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but,
for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful
ar- rangements.... Their 'inexplicability* is not due to the fact that the
cause is unknown, but to the fact that a cause is not even thinkable
in intellectual terms." ( Ibid., pp. 518 f . )

Unconscious, the. C. G. JUNG: "Theoretically, no limits can be set

t o the field of consciousness, since it is capable of indefinite
extension. Empirically, however, it always finds its limit when it
comes up against the unknown. This consists of everything we do
not know, which, therefore, is not related to the ego as the centre of
the field of consciousness. The unknown falls into two groups of
objects: those which are outside and can be experienced by the
senses, and those which are inside and are experienced
immediately. The first group comprises the unknown in the outer
world; the second the unknown in the inner world. We call this latter
territory the unconscious! 9

(Aion, CW9, u, p. 3)

"... everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment
thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now
forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my
conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without pay- ing
attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future
things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to
consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious."

(The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, p. 185)

"Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repres-
sions of painful thoughts and feelings. I call the sum of all these con-
tents the "personal unconscious/ But, over and above that, we also
find in the unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired
but are inherited, e.g., instincts as impulses to carry out actions
from necessity, without conscious motivation. In this 'deeper'
stratum we also find the... archetypes... The instincts and
archetypes to-gether form the 'collective unconscious/ I call it
'collective' because, unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made
up of individual and more or less unique contents but of those which
are universal and of regular occurrence." (Ibid., pp. 133 f . )

The first group comprises contents which are integral components
of the individual personality and therefore could just as well be con-
scious; the second group forms, as it were, an omnipresent,
unchang- ing, and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the
psyche perser( Aion, CW9, ii, p. 7)

The deeper layers* of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness
as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Xower down/ that is
to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they
become increasingly collective until they are universalized and ex-
tinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances.
The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence *at bottom' the psyche
is simply 'world/*

(The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9, i, p. 173)

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

The publication of the first complete collected edition, in English, of
the works of C. G. Jung has been undertaken by Roudedge and
Kegan Paul, Ltd., in England and by Bollingen Foundation in the
United States. Sir Herbert Read, Dr. Michael Fordham, Dr. Gerhard
Adler, and William McGuire compose the Editorial Committee; the
translator is R. F. C. Hull. Since 1967, Princeton University Press
has been the American publisher.

In the following list, dates of original publication are given in
parentheses (of original composition, in brackets). Multiple dates
indicate revisions.

Dagger (t ) denotes volumes in preparation.

1 . PSYCHIATRIC STUDIES

On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena
(1902)

On Hysterical Misreading (1904)

Cryptomnesia (1905)

On Manic Mood Disorder (1 903)

A Case of Hysterical Stupor in a Prisoner in Detention (1902)

On Simulated Insanity (1903)

A Medical Opinion on a Case of Simulated Insanity ( 1904)

A Third and Final Opinion on Two Contradictory Psychiatric Diag-
noses (1906)

On the Psychological Diagnosis of Facts ( 1905)

2. EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCHES

TRANSLATED BY LEOPOLD STEIN

IN COLLABORATION WITH DANA RIVIERE

Studies in Word Association (1904-7, 1910)

The Associations of Normal Subjects (by Jung and F. Rikhn)

An Analysis of the Associations of an Epileptic

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

The Reaction-Time Ratio in the Association Experiment

Experimental Observations on the Faculty of Memory

Psychoanalysis and Association Experiments

The Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence

Association, Dream, and Hysterical Symptom

The Psychopathological Significance of the Association
Experiment

Disturbances in Reproduction in tihe Association Experiment

The Association Method

The Family Constellation

Psychophysical Researches (1907-8)

On the Psychophysical Relations of the Association Experiment
Psychophysical Investigations with the Galvanometer and Pneumo-
graph in Normal and Insane Individuals (by F. Peterson and Jung)

Further Investigations on the Galvanic Phenomenon and
Respiration in Normal and Insane Individuals (by C. Ricksher and
Jung)

Appendix: Statistical Details of Enlistment (1906); New Aspects of
Criminal Psychology (1908); The Psychological Methods of
Investigation Used in the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of
Zurich (1910); On the Doctrine of Complexes ( [1911] 1913); On the
Psychological Diagnosis of Evidence (1937)

3. THE PSYCHO GENESIS OF MENTAL DISEASE

The Psychology of Dementia Praecox( 1907)

The Content of the Psychoses (1908/1914)

On Psychological Understanding (1914)

A Criticism of Bleuler's Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism (1911)

On the Importance of the Unconscious inPsychopathology(1914)

On the Problem of Psychogenesis in Mental Disease (1919)

Mental Disease and the Psyche ( 1928 )

On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia ( 1 939)

Recent Thoughts on Schizophrenia (1957)

Schizophrenia (1958)

4. FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud's Theory of Hysteria: A Reply to Aschaffenburg (1 906)

The Freudian Theory of Hysteria (1908)

The Analysis of Dreams ( 1909)

A Contribution to the Psychology of Rumour (1910-11)

On die Significance of Number Dreams (1910-11)

Morton Prince, "Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams": A Criti-
cal Review (1911)

On the Criticism of Psychoanalysis (1910)

Concerning Psychoanalysis ( 19151)

The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)

General Aspects of Psychoanalysis (1913)

Psychoanalysis and Neurosis (1916)

Some Crucial Points in Psychoanalysis: The Jung-Loy Correspond-
ence (1914)

Prefaces to "Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology" (1916,
1917)

The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual
(1909/1949)

Introduction to Kranefeldt's "Secret Ways of the Mind" (1 930)

Freud and Jung: Contrasts (1929)

5. SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION (1912/1952)

Original German version, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido,
1912 ( = Psychology of the Unconscious); present extensively
revised version, 1952.

Appendix: The Miller Fantasies

6. PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES (I92I)

Appendix: Four Papers on Psychological Typology (1913, 1925,
1931,1936)

7. TWO ESSAYS ON ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

On the Psychology of the Unconscious ( 191 7/1 926/1 943) The
Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious ( 1928)

New Paths in Psychology ( 1912)

The Structure of the Unconscious (1916)

8. THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE

On Psychic Energy (1928)

The Transcendent Function ( [1916/1957)

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung

A Review of the Complex Theory ( 1 934)

The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology ( 1929)

Psychological Factors Determining Human Behaviour (1937)

Instinct and the Unconscious (1919)

The Structure of the Psyche ( 1927/1931 )

On the Nature of the Psyche ( 1947/1954)

General Aspects of Dream Psychology (1916/1 948)

On the Nature of Dreams ( 1 945/1 948)

The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits ( 1920/1948)

Spirit and Life (1926)

Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology (193*)

Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung (1928/1931)

The Real and the Surreal (1933)

The Stages of Life ( 1 930-1 931 )

The Soul and Death ( 1934)

Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952)